A Futurist Turn in the Humanities

A Futurist Turn in the Humanities Mikhail Epstein (bio) THE ART OF THE HUMANITIES The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification of academic disciplines. The crucial question may be formulated as follows: are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? There are three major branches of knowledge established in academia: natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Technology serves as the practical extension ("application") of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study: nature and society. Is there, then, any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a blank space, indicating the open status of the practical applications of the humanities: Nature – natural sciences – technology – transformation of nature Society – social sciences – politics – transformation of society Culture – the humanities – ? – transformation of culture The question mark suggests that we need a practical branch of the humanities that will function like technology and politics but [End Page 593] is specific to the cultural domain. The tendency in the "applied humanities" up to this point has been to technologize or politicize these disciplines, that is, to subject them to the practical modalities of natural or social sciences. "The digital humanities" or "the humanities at the service of ideology" are examples of such subjugation. We need a practical branch of the humanities which resonates with technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain. The simplest term for this transformative branch of the humanities would be the transhumanities—the humanities that aim to transform the area of their studies. The transformative humanities encompass all humanistic technologies, all practical applications of cultural theories. When offering a certain theory, we need to ask ourselves if it is able to inaugurate a new cultural or linguistic practice, an artistic movement, a disciplinary field, a new institution, or a lifestyle. Generally speaking, the humanities can be perceived as art or scholarship, and what I suggest is the resurrection of the art of the humanities.1 This includes the art of building new intellectual communities, new paradigms of thinking and modes of communication, rather than simply studying or criticizing the products of culture. We should bear in mind that the humanities constitute the level of meta-art, different from the primary arts of literature, painting, or music, all of which comprise the objects of humanistic inquiry. The fact that the humanities belong to this meta-discursive level does not preclude their practical, productive orientation. The humanities do not produce works of art, but rather generate new cultural positions, movements, perspectives, and modes of reflexivity. Without practical applications, the humanities are what botany would be without cultivation of plants, forestry, and gardening, or cosmology without practical exploration of outer space. Scholarship becomes scholasticism. But what impact does cultural theory have on contemporary culture, or poetics on living poetry? It should be one of the tasks of literary scholarship to project new ways of writing; a task of linguistics to create new signs, lexical units, and grammatical models that would expand the richness and expressive power of language; and a task of philosophy to project new universals and universes, the alternative worlds that may become more palpable and habitable through the advance of technology. This group of practical disciplines—translinguistics, transaesthetics, transpoetics, etc.—aim to transform those areas of culture which are studied [End Page 594] by the corresponding scholarly disciplines of linguistics, aesthetics, and poetics. One of the broadest applications can be assigned to translinguistics, or "language design," which creates artificial languages or introduces new directions for the development of natural languages. Ludwik Zamenhof's project, the international language Esperanto (first introduced in 1887), obviously does not belong to the field of linguistics properly, though it derives from profound and creative linguistic scholarship. The comparative analysis of existing languages allowed Zamenhof to synthesize a new language that combines in its grammar and vocabulary Roman, German, and Slavic elements and now has about one to two million speakers worldwide. Another...