In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• A Futurist Turn in the Humanities
• Mikhail Epstein (bio)

THE ART OF THE HUMANITIES

The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification of academic disciplines. The crucial question may be formulated as follows: are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them?

There are three major branches of knowledge established in academia: natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Technology serves as the practical extension ("application") of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study: nature and society. Is there, then, any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a blank space, indicating the open status of the practical applications of the humanities:

Nature – natural sciences – technology – transformation of nature

Society – social sciences – politics – transformation of society

Culture – the humanities – ? – transformation of culture

The question mark suggests that we need a practical branch of the humanities that will function like technology and politics but [End Page 593] is specific to the cultural domain. The tendency in the "applied humanities" up to this point has been to technologize or politicize these disciplines, that is, to subject them to the practical modalities of natural or social sciences. "The digital humanities" or "the humanities at the service of ideology" are examples of such subjugation. We need a practical branch of the humanities which resonates with technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.

The simplest term for this transformative branch of the humanities would be the transhumanities—the humanities that aim to transform the area of their studies. The transformative humanities encompass all humanistic technologies, all practical applications of cultural theories. When offering a certain theory, we need to ask ourselves if it is able to inaugurate a new cultural or linguistic practice, an artistic movement, a disciplinary field, a new institution, or a lifestyle. Generally speaking, the humanities can be perceived as art or scholarship, and what I suggest is the resurrection of the art of the humanities.¹ This includes the art of building new intellectual communities, new paradigms of thinking and modes of communication, rather than simply studying or criticizing the products of culture. We should bear in mind that the humanities constitute the level of meta-art, different from the primary arts of literature, painting, or music, all of which comprise the objects of humanistic inquiry. The fact that the humanities belong to this meta-discursive level does not preclude their practical, productive orientation. The humanities do not produce works of art, but rather generate new cultural positions, movements, perspectives, and modes of reflexivity.

Without practical applications, the humanities are what botany would be without cultivation of plants, forestry, and gardening, or cosmology without practical exploration of outer space. Scholarship becomes scholasticism. But what impact does cultural theory have on contemporary culture, or poetics on living poetry? It should be one of the tasks of literary scholarship to project new ways of writing; a task of linguistics to create new signs, lexical units, and grammatical models that would expand the richness and expressive power of language; and a task of philosophy to project new universals and universes, the alternative worlds that may become more palpable and habitable through the advance of technology. This group of practical disciplines—translinguistics, transaesthetics, transpoetics, etc.—aim to transform those areas of culture which are studied [End Page 594] by the corresponding scholarly disciplines of linguistics, aesthetics, and poetics.

One of the broadest applications can be assigned to translinguistics, or "language design," which creates artificial languages or introduces new directions for the development of natural languages. Ludwik Zamenhof's project, the international language Esperanto (first introduced in 1887), obviously does not belong to the field of linguistics properly, though it derives from profound and creative linguistic scholarship. The comparative analysis of existing languages allowed Zamenhof to synthesize a new language that combines in its grammar and vocabulary Roman, German, and Slavic elements and now has about one to two million speakers worldwide. Another...

中文翻译：

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人文学科的未来主义转向

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 人文学科的未来主义转向
• 米哈伊尔·爱泼斯坦（生物）

人文艺术

人文学科的创造性方面尚未在既定的学科分类中得到认可。关键问题可以表述如下：人文学科是一个纯粹的学术领域，还是应该有一些积极的、建设性的补充？

学术界建立了三个主要的知识分支：自然科学、社会科学和人文科学。技术是自然科学的实践延伸（“应用”），政治是社会科学的延伸。技术和政治都旨在改变各自学科的研究内容：自然和社会。那么，人文学科中是否有任何活动与技术和政治的这种变革状态相对应？在下面的模式中，第三行是一个空白，表示人文学科实际应用的开放状态：

自然 – 自然科学 –技术– 改造自然

社会——社会科学——政治——社会转型

文化 – 人文 – ? – 文化转型

问号表明我们需要人文学科的一个实用分支，其功能类似于技术和政治，但[End Page 593]是特定于文化领域的。迄今为止，“应用人文科学”的趋势是将这些学科技术化或政治化，即使它们服从自然科学或社会科学的实践模式。“数字人文学科”或“为意识形态服务的人文学科”就是这种征服的例子。我们需要人文学科的一个实用分支，它与技术和政治产生共鸣，但特定于文化领域。

人文学科这一变革性分支的最简单术语是超人文学科——旨在改变其研究领域的人文学科。变革性人文学科包括所有人文技术，所有文化理论的实际应用。在提供某种理论时，我们需要问自己它是否能够开创一种新的文化或语言实践、艺术运动、学科领域、新制度或生活方式。一般来说，人文学科可以被视为艺术或学术，我所建议的是人文学科艺术的复活。¹这包括建立新知识社区、新思维范式和交流方式的艺术，而不是简单地研究或批评文化产品。我们应该记住，人文构成了元艺术的层次，不同于文学、绘画或音乐的初级艺术，所有这些都是人文探究的对象。人文学科属于这个元话语层次的事实并不排除它们的实践性和生产性取向。人文学科不产生艺术作品，而是产生新的文化立场、运动、观点和反思模式。

没有实际应用，人文学科就是植物学，没有植物学、林业和园艺学，或者宇宙学没有外太空的实际探索。奖学金变成了经院主义。但是文化理论对当代文化或诗学对活诗有什么影响？提出新的写作方式应该是文学学术的任务之一；语言学的任务是创造新的符号、词汇单位和语法模型，以扩展语言的丰富性和表达能力；以及投射新的普遍性和宇宙的哲学任务，通过技术的进步可能会变得更加明显和宜居的替代世界。这组实践学科——跨语言学、跨美学、跨诗学等——旨在改变由相应的语言学、美学和诗学学科研究的文化领域[End Page 594]。

最广泛的应用之一可以分配给跨语言学或“语言设计”，它创建人工语言或为自然语言的发展引入新的方向。Ludwik Zamenhof 的项目，即国际语言世界语（于 1887 年首次推出），显然不属于语言学领域，尽管它源自深刻而富有创造性的语言学研究。对现有语言的比较分析使柴门霍夫能够合成一种新语言，该语言的语法和词汇结合了罗马、德语和斯拉夫元素，现在全世界约有 1 到 200 万使用者。其他...