Culture as Verb

Author’s Note

I wanted to write this book because of two ideas that have been wandering around my head for a long time, asking to be named, defined, and analytically specified. The first one revolves around the appreciation of humanistic writing as a strictly cognitive activity, which is not merely a record or verbalization of some earlier cognitive work, but rather an environment, in which such a cognitive process actually takes place and crystallizes itself – regardless of prior necessary assumptions, plans, or hypotheses. At the beginning the second part of this book, I use Latour’s formula of “text as a laboratory” as the main metaphor to characterize different variants of this creative cognitive practice.

Nevertheless, I do not claim this to be a universal model. Certainly, there are humanists-researchers, who, to use their own self-description, just “put down on paper” what they had already thoroughly planned and specified. I believe, however, that it is not the only and not even most important model. Indeed, we should at least confront it with the one in which cognition does not precede action (in this case writing), but in which it is rather action (writing process) that becomes a specific virtual and empirical laboratory where cognition is activated, organized, and directed – and which ultimately generates cognitive results.

The second idea concerns the need for reorientation of our thinking about culture – which, in the twentieth century, has come to be construed mainly in terms of its nominalized and structural-systemic understanding as a normative system of the symbolic control over human activity – towards another conception, which appreciates culture’s action-oriented, causative, and creative nature; in short, its active quality discussed in the first part of this book.

Thanks to the support of the National Science Centre, which financed the project “Innovative Polish Studies Humanities: The Text as Laboratory,” NCN UMO–2012/07/B/HS2/01451, it became possible to draw conclusions from these loosely coupled ideas and sketch the topography of the confederated – for connected through their opposition toward classic modernity – contemporary research positions which share the basic assumptions of the “action” turn or front.

I am well-aware that this project has not been carried out fully nor extensively enough. However, I hope that it reached the stage in which it provides arguments explaining the undertaken research and, to some extent, sanctions its subject and the outlined problem area. Generally, the book deals with what I call the new humanities, namely a broad and diversified front of orientations, directions, ←9 | 10→turns, and simply moments of curiosity, connected through their opposition toward the principles of contemporary theory of humanistic cognition.

I propose the term “probing” to describe the prevalent way of cognitive action in new-humanistic research. In my view, it is a methodological tactic that differs from more typical humanistic methods in several distinctive respects. First, such method consists in examining a given objective environment from within, that is to say, in the field of commonly shared experience. Second, it focuses on ←10 | 11→trial, partial penetration of the problem territory, most often by studying specific cases. Third, its most privileged technique is a specific kind of “interrogation” of objects, events, and processes, with the use of questions and experimental interventions that can be carried out by virtue of new conceptual vocabularies – a technique, which, in effect, allows various, earlier unnoticed features of research objects to emerge and become present.

1. The Humanities of Yesterday and Today: In a Nutshell and Not without Simplifications

1.1. To Begin: On Critics and Defenders

It has been a long time since the humanities enjoyed such popularity and occupied the center of attention for so long as in the last quarter-century. Admittedly, it has been thanks to the stigma of anachronism imposed by the global tendencies in scientific policies translating into local and peripheral reproduction of solutions introduced, sometimes wrongly, many years ago in the so-called global centers of knowledge “production,” in the perspective of which further “investing” in the humanities appears as economically inefficient, scientifically worthless, and socially useless.

Naturally, the authors of the first argument are the proponents of the market model of technouniversity, for whom economically understood profitability of educational and research services is a fundamental criterion when assessing the value of academic institutions. The second charge comes from the representatives of mathematical and natural science standard of scientificity, from which – as they argue – the humanities’ approach substantially diverges in terms of results, procedures, and criteria. Finally, in the public discourse, the third, often repeated if never empirically confirmed charge became a cliché according to which the humanities are the type of interest that does not stimulate individual careers nor creates new jobs.

Possibly, we may credit some responsibility for this black PR to the well-known fact that the humanities have outran football as the discipline of common interest and competence; not only does everyone feel knowledgeable about this field but also consider themselves its representatives. Anyone who practices the humanities may experience it whenever they meet an entrepreneur, natural scientist, politician, or a journalist, who would start a conversation with a hearty but condescending declaration: “I am a humanist too, but…” after which one may usually expect another attempt to “be put in line” or induce to subordinate to techno-economical, scientific, or political criteria considered as indisputably correct.

To be sure, humanists do not idly watch the progressing marginalization of their position and status. On the contrary, it is indeed fair to say that the wave of discussion, primal studies, and commentaries that was the response to such ←15 | 16→criticism became the phenomenon comparably significant to the campaign for the humanities – or “sciences of mind” – in the times of the anti-positivist breakthrough hundred years earlier. To refrain from going back into too-distant times, it is enough to say that in the Anglophone world – in the current phase of the debate – a book by Bill Readings, on the one hand, and by Martha Nussbaum, on the other,1 played a stimulating role. Similarly, essays by Jacques Derrida and Gadamer or Jaspers were equally important in France and Germany.²

In Poland, books by Maria Janion, Tadeusz Sławek, or the collective volume edited by Józef Kozielecki anticipate a similar kind of discussion. Moreover, works by Michał Paweł Markowski, and Piotr Nowak, or the collective volume edited by Piotr Sztompka³ determine its contemporary nature along other books, symposia, conferences, and the work of the Polish Humanities Crisis Committee or the Citizens of Academia. Even though these texts are worth considering, I will not discuss them here. Instead, I should only mention that, by means of new rhetoric, these authors and institutions in various ways try to defend and force ←16 | 17→the conviction about the indisputable value of the cultural and symbolic capital, which – also today – includes humanistic education and research in its original, autonomous (in a civilizational and cultural sense) and formative shape (in the existential, community, and civic understanding).