Проективный словарь гуманитарных наук - [316]
Some of the terms included in this dictionary, concepts I have introduced in previous publications, are already in use in the humanities or have begun to be so, which attests to their heuristic potential. For instance, the following coinages of mine appear on tens of thousands of Russian– and English-language web-pages:
– metarealizm, “metarealism” (first appearing in a publication of 1983), a literary and artistic movement of the 1970s-90s.
– transkul’tura, “transculture” (1988), a space where various culture meet.
– videokratiia, “videocracy” (1992), the power of visual imagery over the public consciousness.
– khronotsid, “chronocide” (1999), the abolition of temporality in totalitarian as well as postmodern currents of thought.
Also defined in the dictionary are such well-known concepts as “charm,” “creativity”, “fate,” “game,” “love,” “sense,” “silence,” “soulfulness,” “wisdom,” and “word,” – but interpreted anew in the context of contemporary theories of the humanities, or endowed with a terminological status they formerly lacked. Everyone knows that philosophy is the love of wisdom, while psychology is the science of the soul. The word is one of the basic concepts of linguistics, just as love and creativity are of ethics and psychology. But the very disciplines called upon to study these concepts do not in fact pay them much attention. It would be a rare thing to find, in a philosophy or psychology dictionary, entries on wisdom or the soul – the very concepts are considered syncretic and “pre-scholarly.” Although they are constantly used to define many other terms, they themselves implicitly lie outside the bounds of “scholarly” philosophy or psychology. One of the goals of the Predictionary is precisely to articulate these blank spaces in the terminological system of the humanities and to introduce into that system concepts formerly perceived as purely intuitive and belonging to everyday language (“quirk” or “twist” [vyvert]; “depth”; “the interesting” [interesnoe]; “event”; “packaging” or “wrapping” [upakovka], etc.).
Bertrand Russell had occasion to lament that the system of philosophical categories typically features only nouns (“being,” “consciousness,” “idea,” “matter,” etc.), omitting verbs, prefixes, and other auxiliary parts of speech indicating deeper conceptual connections. The Predictionary attempts to fill in this blank and introduce more dynamic and relative concepts expressed by verbs, prepositions, prefixes and other parts of speech and grammatical units (“to eventify,” “in,” “hyper-,” “proto-”, “nega-”, etc.)
The dictionary may be used as a tool for the methodological renovation of the humanities in their current period of relative stagnation, as they risk turning into what the study of dead languages has become for modernity – the sign of a cultural refinement already superfluous in a technocentric age. The dictionary demonstrates that the humanities harbor great creative potential, and that their role is not limited to the study of the past; in fact, they shape the future of humanity, its pathway to self-awareness and self-realization.
This book is the result of its author’s half-century of work in various fields of the humanities. I studied philology at Moscow State University and originally specialized in literary theory and aesthetics. In the 1980s, in connection with the formation of new literary and intellectual movements in the USSR, I began to consider the question of how the humanities, including philology, aesthetics, and poetics, might influence the development of literature itself and enable such emerging currents thereof as metarealism and conceptualism to define themselves. In the 1990s, I dealt with issues of postmodernism and the emergence of a new cultural formation coming to take its place (After the Future, 1995; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, 1999). At the same time, I was drawn to the interdisciplinary approach involving the juxtaposition and interplay of different cultures, particularly Russian and American culture (Transcultural Experiments, 1999). My interests gradually migrated toward the field of philosophy, especially modality theory (Filosofiia vozmozhnogo [The Philosophy of the Possible], 2001), as well as modern theology, with a focus on researching the spiritual condition of a post-atheist society (Religiia posle ateizma [Religion After Atheism], 2013). In the 2000s, I began to be interested in linguistics and its transformative potential – how it can influence the development of language and broaden its lexical-morphological system (Dar slova. Proektivnyi leksikon russkogo iazyka [The Gift of the Word: A Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language], 2000-16). Finally, in the last fifteen years I have become increasingly concerned with the fate of the humanities as a whole and the potential for developing humanities-based practices and technologies capable of influencing the life of society. This is the subject of the books
