Abstract

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