O stole, przy którym powstają nowości, granicach literackości i polskiej humanistyce, która może podbić świat, mówi dr Maciej Maryl, kierownik Centrum Humanistyki Cyfrowej, z-ca dyrektora ds. ogólnych Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN.
The paper presents two competing perceptions of the modern university: the economic and the humanistic. While the economic approach has numerous and potent advocates in the modern, rationalized world, those opting for the humanist approach have to struggle for attention and understanding. The author aims to highlight the conflict between the two seemingly contradictory visions of the university in her sociological commentary about the debate over the importance of the humanities in Poland and worldwide. There exists, however, a kind of ontological meta-frame which allows the rhetoric of a ‘factory of knowledge’ and a ‘temple of knowledge’ to be accommodated. It consists in thinking of universities in universalistic categories, which should be the concern of the state as it seeks Poland’s civilizational advance—in the full meaning of the phrase.
In a follow-up to Ryszard Nycz’s work Culture as Verb this article outlines a new way of bringing forward his great project. The challenge it has to face is the cognitive dilemma that lurks at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, or, in other words, the dissonance between the traditional paradigm of accumulating and developing the store of cultural knowledge and cognitive procedures that underpin new, experimental and inductive knowledge with a potential to effect qualitative change. The article contends that Nycz’s study allows us to bypass that dilemma. The ‘Third Way’, as it is called here, would open up new forms of innovation, i.e. not just knowledge whose value is determined by its utility for the systems of late capitalism, but a mode of concrete practice of rediscovering the outer world for the humanities. In the process of capturing and transforming of that world, the metaphors of embodied labour and of knowledge production (conceptualized as the verb) function as extraordinarily important tools of the humanities reinvented as a practical, embodied theory.
This article takes a look at Ryszard Nycz’s new, groundbreaking study of cultural theory, pointedly titled Culture as Verb. It focuses on the author’s two major claims which seem to provide a foundation for the whole project. One is a vigorous defence of the humanities, the other is the proposition that culture may be best understood as a verb. The latter provokes a number of questions, especially about the role of invention, a dominant factor in any action-oriented model of culture. For example, would invention control and drive the mechanism of semantic ordering and appropriation of the things that used to be nameless, ignored, or suppressed? Is that domination culturally determined, or merely conditioned? Is it a source of suffering? It would also be interesting to find out more about the Nycz’s idea of transition from passive participation to the culture of active participation. The question is: Are we doomed to take part? As an aside, the author of this essay draws our attention to the darker side of being permanently involved in other people lives, the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) anxiety, and a new narcissism.
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