Mapping Blank Spaces: On the
Future of the Humanities
by Mikhail Epshtein
Mikhail Epstein (Epstein) is a famous Russian-American cultural
and literary scholar. He is Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature
at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). His new book is devoted to key problems of
the humanities in the 21st c., in particuilar, to the emerging field of
"transhuman" studies, dealing with the fate of the human in the epoch
of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The book examines how this new
techno-cultural environment radically changes, in a threatening but also an
inviting manner, the profession of the humanist, methods of scholarship
and intellectual creativity. The central concepts of the humanities, such as word and text, time and possibility, body and desire, wisdom and madness, the
strange and the interesting, are discussed in the context of new theoretical
strategies that come to succeed poststructuralism and deconstruction.
The book focuses on a fundamental
shift in current cultural attitudes: we live not after significant trends of
the past (modernity, structuralism, etc.), but at the very beginning of a new
era, whose positive features now can be characterized in terms of "proto-":
proto-global, proto-virtual, proto-cyborgian...
Thinking in terms of beginnings and initiations presupposes an open future
rather than consummation of what has gone before. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of
"embryonic genres, with a still undeveloped compositional skeleton,"
can be applied to other "embryonic" cultural formations whose birth
we are witnessing today.
The book applies Thomas Kuhn's concept
of "paradigmatic shifts" both to the current state and potential
developments in the humanities. From erotology to horrology, from the ecology
of text to the theory of fate--the book offers a wide range of new ideas and
hypotheses intended to question and modify paradigms of humanistic
thinking. At the core of the book is the argument that analytic philosophies of
language that dominated the humanities of the 20th centure, both in the
Anglo-American analytic tradition and in Continental structuralism and
postructuralism, will pave the way to a philosophy of synthesis. The task of
the humanities is constructive rather than deconstructive: to synthesize new
concepts and disciplines that would expand the realm of the speakable and
thinkable and provide new language for the self-definition of human beings.
Each gap in the system of signs is
potentially a new sign that transforms the entire system. This book explores
the creative potentials of those cultural lacunae that give birth to new
artistic and theoretical practices. Each chapter presents an argument for
a new humanistic discipline, a genre of writing or a scholarly method that
would shape the future of the humanities.
Preface
INTRODUCTIONS
On Situation: From Post- to Proto-
On Science: The Mass of
Knowledge and the Energy of Thought
On Method: Concepts that
Conceive, or Conceptivism
On Genre: A
Manifesto-Hypothesis and a Treatise-Bonsai
TEMPORIZATION
Chronocide: A Prologue to the
Resurrection of Time
Debut de Siecle: A Manifesto for
Proteism
AROUND THE WORD
"
". Mapping Blank Space: Towards the Ecology of Text
The Preposition "In" as
a Philosophical Concept: Word Frequencies and the Picture of the World
A Word as a Literary Work: On the
Genre of Neologism
The Ways of Russian Logos:
Analysis and Synthesis in Word Creation.
AROUND THE BODY
Grooming: A Hypothesis on the Origin
of Culture
The Poetics of Intimacy: An
Introduction to Erotology
THE HIDDEN AND THE REVEALED
The Mystics of Packing: An
Introduction into Tegimenology
The Interesting
The Uncanny and the Strange
The Methods of Madness and The
Madness of a Method
An Act and an Accident: Towards
the Theory of Fate
SCIENTIAE DESIDERATAE
From Science Fiction to Fictional
Sciences
Humanology: The Ecology of Humans
and Anthropology of Machines
Culturonics: Technology of the
Humanities
Transculture: The Practical
Dimension of Cultural Studies
Universics: Towards a Critical
Universality
Realogy: A Study of Singular
Things
Micronics: A Study of Smallness
Trivialogy and Metapractice:
Metaphysics of Everyday Life
Essayistics as a Zero Discipline
Semiurgy: From the Analysis to the
Synthesis of Language
Ipseism, or What is it Like to be Oneself: From Cognitive Science to Ethics
Stereoethics: The Duality of
Virtues and the Diamond-Golden Rule
Horrology: Horror as the Highest
Stage of Civilization
Technosophia and Other
"Sophias"
From Sophia to Philosophy and Back
Appendix. Amerussia: Biculturalism
and Liberty
Glossary
Major Publications
Index