Masthead and table of contents of Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture Nr. 47 (2/2022).

Er(r)go…

...we are entering the realm of autopoiesis, in other words, the humanists write about the humanities which – dissatisfied as usual – undergo diverse evolutions: new humanities, applied humanities, ecological humanities, posthumanities, digital humanities, non-anthropocentric humanities, biohumanities, etc. Numerous questions are being asked – vital, general and specific. What was in the beginning? From whom to learn? Who is a human being? Who are we in the world of ambiguity and contradiction? So what to do to move forward? Aren’t the anointed scraps too often taken for the essence of truth? Will the vision of rescue history save the future? Are the humanities political? Do those who write always write about the things they really know? Do we measure what we value or do we value what is measurable? What’s the point of chasing points? Aren’t the tensions with the margin a chance for a cultural katharsis? What will we say to another human being face to face when the walls collapse? Is not roaring unique? Are Wojnicz’s shorts good for bathing?

To keep the balance, next to the questions there appear postulates, commandments and appeals: to replace the arrogance of anthropocentrism with a mindframe of symbiotic thinking; to prevent self-degradation of the humanities; to differentiate between the logic of thinking and the ethics of thinking; to search for a dynamic third way; to renounce the objectivising distance; to move towards fluidity, processuality, relationality and nomadicity; to home  the world and to world the home. The body is a force to be reckoned with. Women’s task, lesbians in particular, is to overthrow the category of gender. Time to turn our attention to mushroom picking. No more confessions of guilt. Science, responsibility, truth and liberty. 

Unfortunately, story-wise, not much is happening. Various self-assertions simulate the objectivity of self-satisfied narratives, Jesus calls his Father, but Father does not pick up the phone, interpretative strategies promise less and question more, the past is being interrogated, local mandarins stonewall thinking, parametrisation discriminates the humanities, Sartre writes about the striptease of humanism, Sofia engages in a game of fort/da with the medusae, and then wishes to turn her mother to stone. Naturally, the humanist asks questions, has doubts and criticises, tight captive circles put up stout resistance, civilisation of facilitation produces intellectual indolence, and from far and near one can hear the multi-voiced, monstrously multitudinous global chorus asking about the future of the world, willy-nilly fragmented and objectivised by the man of humanism. After all, from nature’s point of view human being is a defective animal.

Very big, just big, and not-so-big names multiply, but few human and non-human characters enter the stage: except for Wojnicz and a few others, there appear nematodes, strongyloides, mycelia, rural landscapes, monsters, mycorrhiza, and fattened Europe. These are followed by notions, conceptions, concepts, ideologies, methodologies, abstractions, categories, and sometimes phenomena. Animism and ecosophy, futurology, metahistory, assemblage geographies, asemantic, agrammatic, and asyntagmatic semiotics, ecological economics, eco-logic. Of course, there is the Anthropocene, but also the Symbiocene and the Auxocenne, as well as various humanisms: posthumanism and humanism plus against antihumanism, and on top of that degradation of the humanities. Across the possible and necessary worlds move diverse metacognitive turns, travelling concepts, ecotopes, assemblages, tangles, post-proto-subjectivities, posthumanist rites, posthuman thinking, conscious breathing (a rescue for the humanities?), transsubjective liquidity, growthism, degrowth and postgrowth, ecoverve and indigenous peoples’ knowledge. Some phenomena do not inspire optimism: resource and energy binging, ontoepistemological blindness, cultural disability, precarious life in ruins, the world with no purpose or order, the catastrophe-which-is-coming, overconsumption, planetary environmental crisis, a long-term penetration across the frozen layers of meanings and afterimages, the irrationality of rationality, financialization of the economies, gangster monopolies, surveillance capitalism, cognitive capitalism, splinter capitalism, hatred of work. Some people are proud of not reading books. Hah!

Is there a remedy for these maladies? Well, there is! Following the Professor’s advice, one should just quickly move their right thumb. We press it and it works!

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

PS English versions of these “prologues” were translated by Tomasz Kalaga (issues 12 to 38) and Marcin Mazurek (from issue 39). Admiration for the linguistic equilibristics!

Translated by Marcin Mazurek

The article, written in the form of an academic interpellation, addresses a series of tensions inherent in the attitudes adopted by humanists in defense against contradictions within the discipline, which often lead to the self-degradation of the humanities themselves. Such contradictions are usually resolved by resorting to one of the extreme attitudes that tear difficult cognitive complexities apart. Such practices are symptomatic
of a variety of problems that need to be taken into account in university-level teaching and research; above all, however, their presence demonstrates that in the decades to come the discipline will need hightened receptiveness to such phenomena, based on authentic concern for the quality of the cultural rootedness of publications within the humanities – both within the historical and the present day canon of the discipline.
The article also points to the pitfalls of the unilateralization of academic reflection and to the perils of reductionism – especially in the context of individual responsibility for the quality of contemporary reflection and for the formulas of reference to the tradition of the classics of thought. The author analyses a cross-section of phenomena testifying to the urgency of the problem of the self-degradation of the humanities in university practice, and thereby formulates the horizon of the postulated academic debate with the view to attaining a new quality of functioning of the humanities and social sciences as integrally related.

If, as Hannah Arendt stated in Eichmann in Jerusalem, evil is thoughtless, can thinking protect us from evil? In the first part of the article, I make a distinction between intellect (which follows the logic of thinking) and reason (which follows the ethics of thinking). I put forward the thesis that if the ethics of thinking (reason) does not guide the logic of thinking (intellect), it breeds evil and fanaticism. In the second part of this text, I address causes of contemporary thoughtlessness, including mediocrity, pragmatism, measurability, and the dominance of the mercantile mentality. The final part of this essay emphasizes the responsibility of universities (especially in the area of the humanities) and, in broader perspective, of culture, for the education of reason.

The purpose of this paper is a straightforward one: to step back from the increasing use of assemblage in recent debates and to attempt to take stock of what assemblage thinking offers to humanities. I relate the answer to this question to the title concept of “sewn-together” humanities, which has a tentative and ad hoc character. The starting point is the analysis of the video installation realized by Angela Melitopoulos and
Maurizio Lazzarato, entitled Assemblages, which relies upon the concept of assemblages proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assuming that research practices and theories combine assemblages of ideas of both abstract and practical nature, I analyse examples of the application of assemblage thinking and action at the levels of a method, methodology, and onto-epistemology, tracing the goals that humanities achieve by means of this approach to research.

In the article, I put forward the thesis that research based on scientistic assumptions (in the sense of the tendency to make the humanities and social sciences similar to natural sciences, that is: based on ontological and methodological naturalism) is marginal and only auxiliary importance in the exploration of human practices (I consider it on the example of pedagogy as the science of a subjective and communicational undertaking called education). I argue that when the scientistic model of research becomes dominant – as it is nowadays – it obscures the basic subject of pedagogical research: education. As a result, the public image of education is reduced and distorted.

The article begins with an analysis of the inconvenient starting points for reflection on the Anthropocene, inspired by the position of Anna L. Tsing. Next, the interdisciplinary, normative and pluralistic field of ecological economics will be presented, with a particular focus on the concept of degrowth. The text will trace the “grammar” of this discipline, revealing its selected philosophical assumptions, methodological postulates and concepts. It will also look closely at Peter A. Victor’s concept of “management without growth.” It will seek answers to what degrowth is and why the cooling of growth is inevitable.

The crisis of classical humanism is a fact. It has revealed its dark reverse. They are slavery, colonialism, exploitation, exclusion, discrimination. Humanism turned out to be the offspring of patriarchalism, gender chauvinism and speciesism. Therefore, it has to be overcome. One of the proposals is posthumanism. It is based on a different research method (I call it the “sense of participation”), a different concept of the subject (nomad) and a new ethics, the shape of which is still emerging. In the article, I point to its foundations in the form of a female ethics of care, which – in my opinion – opens the horizons to a more holistic, egalitarian, pluralized human–non-human existence.

This article reconstructs the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of futurology, as a distinct field of research, and of Herman Kahn’s scenario analysis, as an investigative tool alternative to trend analysis. Two main paradigms characterized prospective thinking up to the mid-20th century, a historico-literary one that emphasized the importance of imagination and artistic talent, and a technical-scientific one that favored the rigorous analysis of data and precision of forecasts. After the Second World War, these two paradigms found a virtuous synthesis in scenario analysis, a halfway approach between literary arts and science. The author argues that the use of imagination and creativity does not undermine the scientific status of futurology, just as it does not put in jeopardy that of other sciences. He also introduces the term imaginative coefficient to indicate a fundamental ingredient of prospective thinking and provides the theoretical basis of this concept.

The aim of this article is to present a proposal for supplementing the humanities with the posthuman activist onto-epistemological tools. The author, taking the concept of the posthuman community as a starting point, performs the process of rethinking the oikology – a philosophy of the home that grew out of Silesia. Posthuman oikology is intended to transcend the limitations encountered by ecological thought towards the author’s concept of eco-logic. Eco-logical humanities are intended as an affirmative response to the cognitive crisis associated with, among other things, climate change and the predicted catastrophe.

Recent wailing over the condition of the humanities is an integral part of a greater debate on the crisis of democracy, identity, the Enlightenment, the critique of globalisation, and post-modernity. What is more, such lamentation expresses human helplessness as we confront the radicalisation of political movements and parties connected to the inevitable process of rapidly progressing and all-encompassing civilisational and cultural change. Among the factors influencing its perception, the sense of generational alienation actively co-creating the democratic order in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, as well as of the Western elites involved in deepening European integration, has to be first and foremost considered. Their values were in ruins. The ambivalent and double-edged nature of the transformation of almost all spheres of life, the complexity and contradictions inherent in social and political change brought about a sense of unease, reinforced by the unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic and an all-embracing crisis of the sense of social security.

The main goal of the article is to look at the most important theses of Marcuse’s philosophy in order to identify their actuality or nonactuality. The theses in question are those which say that we are living in the totally administrated world, where one-dimensional man has been created by industrial capitalism, culture has affirmative character as for the status quo, people work too much, technics and technology are important
elements of the politics, the most important economic power are not transparent for the society and the classical subject of political change – working class is not able to cause political change any longer, which is why there is need to seek for a new such subject. I try to defend a stand according to which Marcuse’s theses are still actual and valid if only one takes into account today’s phenomena in economics, politics and social life.

Taking as a starting point a few key passages in the Gospels about the Last Supper and Crucifixion, the author tries to show how the linguistic machinery of a text reveals its deconstructive aspect – making a call for cultural appropriation on the one hand and resisting this appropriation on the other. This duplicity is also projected onto an existential level, reflecting the tension between life as an idiomatic aspect of every
human endeavor and culture understood as subjecting to shared experience. The main conceptual impetus of the essay goes against maintaining the sharp distinction between life rejecting an accurate representation and existence with all the reproduction devices it carries with itself. This analysis, referring to a vast corpus of Derrida’s texts, goes beyond a metacommentary limited to French philosophy or literary studies and can also
be read as a contribution to a theological interpretation of the Gospels made with the help of deconstructive logic.

Is the term metahistory a repetition of the Aristotelian gesture of naming metaphysics? In 2023, half a century passes since the first publication of Hayden White’s famous book Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. However, this classic, fairly well-known work – as well as its criticism – did not give life to the term metahistory, which in the horizon of research terms is enjoyed, for example, by metaphysics. In these considerations, I do not mean sentimental reminding about a term that would be valuable today for the sole reason that it once existed. Rather, it is an attempt to think about the path of enriching (re)thinking of the historical imagination – the latter, I believe, is the key to resisting the contemporary crises and impasses of today’s humanities.

The article stems from the conviction that there is an analogy between departing from the anthropocentric model of reflection (symptomatic for the so-called posthumanities) and certain practices developed by various schools of spirituality in order to overcome the egocentric viewpoint. The author provides a theoretical framework, which attempts at redefining the notion of imagination in the context of ecocriticism and Malabou’s plasticity. Then she draws attention to cases in which contemporary humanists engage in artistic projects using methods of conscious breathing and meditation. She analyzes those installations in the light of contemporary research on meditation and shows how these postsecular practices stimulate self-transcendent experiences.

Sofia Papastergiadis – the protagonist of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk – seems to be encircled by various monstrosities. First, her overbearing, monstrous mother suffers from an equally monstrous unidentifiable illness, because of which the two women travel to Almería, seeking answers and potential therapy. Second, while in Andalusia, Sofia is often attacked by Medusae/jellyfish, which is a painful, yet uncannily addictive experience. Third, the protagonist is puzzled with her own doubtful motivations, hasty decisions, and
dark fascinations, resurfacing, for instance, in a pursuit of toxic, but sensual, affairs. All of these drive Sofia to investigate yet another monster: one residing inside her. In this article, I propose a reading informed by psychoanalysis and feminist criticism which aims at tracing how the discourse of illness interweaves with that of monstrousness in Levy’s Booker-shortlisted bildungsroman. Keeping in mind that disease and monstrosity engage in an interplay of secrecy and revelation in the novel, I wish to study the implications of that for the protagonist and her relationships with others.

Summaries of feature texts of the present issue in the Polish language.

Information for future Contributors -- thematic areas, text formatting, and stylesheet.

The colophon of the E(r)rgo. Theory - Literature - Culture issue No. 47 (2/2023).