Mikhail Epstein

Semiurgy: From Language Analysis to Language Synthesis

The article focuses on the transition from language analysis to language synthesis as a new strategy in the performative humanities of the early 21st century. In addition to semiotics, the practical discipline of semiurgy (signformation) is described in the context of growing creative potential of electronic communications. For philosophy, it means the turn to linguistic vitalism as an attempt to synthesize the legacies of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

From Culturology to Transculture

Culturology is a specific branch of Russian humanities that found its earliest expression in the works of Nikolai Danilevsky (1822–85) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), culminating in the 1960s–80s with works by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), Aleksei Losev (1893–1988), Yury Lotman (1922–93), Vladimir Bibler (b. 1918), Georgy Gachev (b. 1929), and Sergei Averintsev (b. 1937). Culturology investigates the diversity of cultures and their modes of interaction and functions as a metadiscipline within the humanities, the aim of which is to encompass and link the variety of cultural phenomena studied separately by philosophy, history, sociology, literary and art criticism, etc.

INVENTIVE THINKING IN THE HUMANITIES

This essay’s central concern is the need for a new, practical dimension in the humanities, emphasizing their constructive rather than purely scholarly aspects. An analysis is offered of various types of inventions in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, art, and literature, such as new disciplines, genres, cultural practices, and intellectual movements. An invention is not the production of a given work, however great, but rather a principle or technique that can be applied to the production of many works by others. Following Francis Bacon’s call for the invention of new arts and sciences, the essay outlines new disciplines: technohumanities , which would study humans as a part of the technosphere; pathohumanities, which would investigate the self-destructive mechanisms of civilization; and scriptorics, which would focus on Homo scriptor , who has survived “the death of the author.” A research and educational program, uniting major fields of the humanities, is proposed: PILLAR (the acronym of philosophy, information, language, literature, art, religion ) would be a transdisciplinary strategy complementary to STEM, integrating scholarship and inventorship.

Paradoxical Speech Acts: Transformatives and Counterformatives

The existing theory of speech acts developed by John L. Austin draws a distinction between constative and performative utterances. Constatives report facts, or relate a state of affairs: ‘My mother cleaned the window’; ‘The Earth revolves around the Sun’. Performatives, on the other hand, carry out actions; that is, they perform the action they describe by the very fact of describing it. Of performative kind are, for instance, diplomatic: ‘We declare war’ and gentlemanly: ‘I challenge you to a duel’. The most well known type of performative utterance seems to be an annunciation: ‘We declare the independence of our republic’; ‘I declare the Olympic Games open’. Another type of a performative is a contractual utterance: ‘Agreed. I will be waiting for you on Wednesday’; ‘I promise I won’t let you down’; ‘I’ll bet you he won’t come’; ‘I bequeath all my property to my son’, etc.

Lyrical Philosophy, or How to Sing with Mind

The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as (etymologically) love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many various feelings that we experience, there is a discrete group that, thanks to their involvement with universals, may be regarded as philosophical. Wonder, grief, compassion, tenderness, hope, despair, and delight are philosophical if they are experienced on behalf of humankind and addressed to the world as a whole. The vocation of philosophy is to expand the realm of feelings through the generalizing capacity of the reason, so that love, joy, and pain can be experienced in a noble way, on a maximally global scale, not reducible to private or practical situations. Emotions of philosophical cast affect the world more powerfully than metaphysical ideas and logical propositions. Revolutions are driven less by ideas than by philosophical wrath, exasperation with the existing order of things, and the feeling that the world is unjust. It is in this context that Epstein’s essay defines the genre of lyric philosophy as a direct self-expression of the thinking subject in the process of attaining self-cognition—as represented, for instance, in the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and Nietzsche. Philosophical subjecthood as a means of self-expression for the transcendental subject (in the Kantian sense) should be distinguished from the purely personal subjectivity inherent to empirical individuals, in the same way and to the same extent as philosophical feelings should be distinguished from mundane ones experienced in everyday situations. Since the subject focused on itself is essential to lyricism, we may even speak of the generic , inescapable lyricism of philosophy per se.

An Essay On the 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.

Introduction: Idées Fixes and Fausses Idées Claires

This essay, coauthored by the editor and a member of the editorial board of Common Knowledge , introduces the fifth installment of the journal’s symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” which is about the “consequence of blur.” Beginning with a review of Enlightenment ideas about ideas—especially Descartes’s argument that a mind “unclouded and attentive” can be “wholly freed from doubt” ( Rules III, 5)—this essay then turns to assess the validity of counter-Enlightenment arguments, mostly Russian but also anglophone and French, against the association of clarity and certainty. A line of descent is drawn from the speaker of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy to Dostoevsky’s underground man, and the latter is shown to differ from the former mainly in that the underground man sympathizes consciously with Descartes’s bete noire , the “evil deceiver” (Descartes’s speaker sympathizes perhaps unconsciously). Enlightenment, in other words, is not as it appears to be, for rationalists too insist on their caprice. Hyper-rationality, it is argued, can be a form of madness, a mania over clarity, distinctions, rules, principles, and unquestionable truths. Examples from Russian and anglophone literature are given of how easily the distance from idee claire to idee fixe is to traverse. The end product of un-self-doubting rationality tends to be delay or stoppage of the intellect, which this essay terms noostasis (and proposes is the opposite of ekstasis ).

The philosophical implications of Russian conceptualism

The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei Siniavsky, in particular to his treatise “On Socialist Realism” (1959). Instead of praising socialist realism as the “truthful reflection of life” (as did official Soviet criticism), or condemning it as a “distortion of reality and poor ideologized art” (as did dissident and liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the signs and images of socialist realism, while introducing a playful distance from their ideological content. This project was realized in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of Sots-Art and Conceptualism, influential artistic and intellectual movements that transformed the Soviet ideological system into material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism is not merely an artistic trend; its philosophical significance is revealed in the art and programmic statements of Ilya Kabakov and Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, in Alexander Zinovievs fiction, in Dmitry Prigovs poetry, articles and manifestos, and in Boris Groyss theoretical works. As a philosophy, Conceptualism presupposes that any system of thought is self-enclosed and has no correspondence with reality. The relationship between Conceptualism and Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists (whose moderate version was also called “conceptualism”) and realists in the epoch of the Medieval scholastics: whereas Marxists assert the historical reality of such concepts as collectivism, equality, and freedom, Conceptualists demonstrate that all these notions are contingent on mental structures or derived from linguistic structures. Therefore, from a Conceptualist standpoint, a “concept” is any idea–political, religious, moral–presented as an idea, without any reference to its real prototype or the possibility of realization. That is why Conceptualism, as a philosophy, is so strongly connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity, as a verbal statement or visual projection of idea as such, so that all its factual or practical extensions are revealed as delusions. For example, conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims of all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of self-referential signs and internal consistencies forcefully imposed on external reality. When considering more properly philosophical ideas, Conceptualism creates parodies of metaphysical discourse, using, for example, Hegelian or Kantian rhetorical models for the description of such trivial objects as flies or garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of traditional philosophy–it is also a project for the proliferation of new, multiple metaphysics, each of which consciously demonstrates the contingency of its central concept, be it Absolute Spirit in Hegel or a fly in Kabakov. Postmodernism is often criticized for its aestheticism and moral indifference, but Russian conceptualists emphasize the moral implications of metaphysical contingency, which undermines totalitarian and hegemonic discourse and promotes self-irony as a mode of humility. Conceptualism identifies itself as a predominantly Russian-Soviet mode of thinking. In the West, the correlation between ideological signs and observable reality has been persistently validated through scientific and economic practice; while in Russia, traditionally, reality itself has been constructed from ideological signs generated by its ruling minds as a kind of hyper-reality. Thus, Russian Conceptualism sees itself not as a mere replica of Western postmodernism, but as a reflection of the underlying structures of Russian history, where the signs of reality have always been subject to ideological manipulation.

Hyperauthorship in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Primary Author and Conceptual Personae

This article explores the phemenon of hyperauthorship in intellectual writing: a primary author (hyperauthor) creates a number of secondary authors (hypoauthors), and develops possible conceptual systems on their behalf. The case under consideration is Mikhail Bakhtin and his complex relationship with his friends Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov, members of the so called “Bakhtin’s circle” (in the 1920s) who are credited with authorship of several books which may have been actually written by Bakhtin himself. Still unclear from biographical and historical perspectives, this problem of authentic attribution of Medvedev’s and Voloshinov’s texts can be clarified in the theoretical framework of “hyperauthorship” and “possibilistic thinking.” This article applies Bakhtin’s own theory of the “primary author immersed in silence,” as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “conceptual personae,” to explain this case of “shared,” or “transferred” authorship. The figures of Voloshinov and Medvedev, though historically real, may be viewed as Bakhtin’s projections of “ideal,” or “utopian” Marxism in linguistics and literary theory.