The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto by Mikhail Epstein (review)

Abstract

Epstein, Mikhail. 2012. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. Translated and edited by Igor Klyukanov. New York: Bloomsbury. $120.00 hc. $34.95 sc. xxiii + 318 pp.Reading Mikhail Epstein's The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto, one could do worse than to begin at its glossary, a collection of sixty-five protologisms (101). In mode of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy, Epstein's work hinges on grammatical exploration. Each chapter coins a theoretical term and examines how research into field term institutes might alter scholarly methodology and thus sustain humanities in global cultures. Through this practice of sign creation, or semiurgy (95), Epstein means to reestablish human within humanities-to foreground truth and objectivity in future- thinking cultural inquiries. Reviving such standards long since disavowed by English and philosophy alike, work clearly earns its subtitle.Epstein regards manifesto as performative discourse, a genre that constructs future through very act of its manifestation (19). Accordingly, text's experiments in language take form as directives, which editor and translator of Russian manuscript, Igor Klyukanov, arranges into five thematic movements that trace new intersections across humans, creativity, wisdom, and machines. Deliberating why the orientation to future {has} become exclusive privilege of natural sciences and science-based technologies (286), Epstein posits threatened status of humanities in conjunction with recent technological development as signs for scholars to shift from a mindset of post to proto. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism: for Epstein, these terms signal scholarly dependence on past that is antithetical to growing demand for innovation that higher education now imposes on literary and philosophical study. Hence Epstein names spirit that drives Transformative Humanities defined as study ofemerging, not-yet- formed phenomena (33). Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of embryonic genres serves as foundation for future thinking, insofar as Bakhtinian thought opposes finalization and helps to orient Epstein's inquiry away from post-postmodernism and towards proto-global, proto-virtual, proto-biotechnic, proto-synthetic grounds among others (28). In effect, Epstein's text pragmatically emphasizes how digital humanities and interdisciplinary crossover with sciences might reconstruct humanities research as central to societal and technological evolution. The disciplines proposed, for instance-in chapter 11, Horrology: The study of civilization in fear of itself, and in chapter 13, Micronics: The study of small things-make recent paradigm shifts central for literary criticism, metaphysics, and aesthetics alike. One could then cast global warming, biotechnology, nanotechnology, conspiracy theory, and postapocalyptic narratives, to name a few possibilities, as foundational rather than topical disciplinary elements. Ideally, research becomes capable not only of responding to these subjects but also of shaping their implications for behaviors and beliefs. In a posthuman age, Epstein argues, humanities must take role of cultural transformer.With this responsibility in mind, Epstein's project recognizes its ethical underpinning, a more detailed take on old supposition that humanities can cultivate perceptive and considerate human lives. Epstein's pragmatics, in other words, exist at crossroads of technological innovation, philosophical ethics, and disciplinarity. Foregrounding ethics not only affords text value in an introductory philosophy class, but also, according to proteism, enlivens moral, human undertones of longstanding epistemological dilemmas. Thomas Nagel's famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974), for example, grounds Epstein's inquiry in role of imaginative projection in human self- consciousness. …