Humanities-as-Technique: New Images of Knowledge and Ontological Construction

Abstract

The sociocultural landscape of contemporaneity can be represented as a porous inhomogeneous space consisting of border zones. These zones (exchange zones), understood by P. Galison (1999, 137-60) as “local coordination of beliefs and actions,” can be deployed due to already existing conditions, for example, a project may arise at a university. However, such zones do not create sustainable social configurations and infrastructures associated with new areas of knowledge. In this article, we expand the concept of trading zones and call them zones requiring local ontologies that arise on the border between different knowledge and imagination systems and, in turn, require their own infrastructure. This approach supports the view on humanities not as “pre-packaged” knowledge (Daston 2009, 807), but as special “technique” forming local ontologies. For a humanities-as-technique to emerge, it is necessary that two or more systems of knowledge coincide in time and form an intermediate zone, on the basis of which some local ontology can unfold. Thus, for example, when combining contemporary philosophy and contemporary mathematics (topology), new images of knowledge emerge. Humanities-as-technique are considered as the basis for the establishment of trading zones, which are understood as local ontologies. We also propose a system of concepts that can be used to describe and construct these trading zones on the territory of the humanities in a techno-oriented cultural environment.