There are many kinds of dictionaries and encyclopedias in existence, but all are typically descriptive, that is, they describe terms that are already known. A predictionary, by contrast, does not register terms of the present, but anticipates a culture’s future developments, maps out its conceptual and terminological possibilities. You look in a traditional dictionary for an explanation of words you have previously encountered; the operative reference system is that of “extant text → dictionary.” In a predictionary, the opposite relationship is in effect: “dictionary → potential text” – that is, a text that could be created on the basis of the dictionary, in light of the new concepts being introduced into the language.
This predictionary contains 440 concepts and terms that encompass general issues of the humanities, the philosophy of being and knowledge, society and technology, ethics, aesthetics, religious studies, culturology, literary studies, linguistics, and several new disciplines that are only now emerging. The point of the dictionary is to radically update the humanities’ conceptual and terminological apparatus, and to sketch their immediate and long-term prospects. The dictionary could be called heuristic in that it demonstrates various methods of meaning-making, of forming new ideas and concepts. It reflects intellectual, linguistic, social, and technological processes of the early third millennium that call for new methods of articulation. The dictionary introduces the method of projective thinking – which describes the potential design of an object not currently available – to the humanities. By the very logic of its development, the information society becomes a transformation one, based on our knowledge of that which does not yet exist, but which is created by the constructive capability of thought itself.
The coining of new terms or special adaptation of extant words has always played a particular role in the humanities, especially in philosophy. To think means to create a new language, one that goes “against the grain” of everyday discourse, critically purged of trivial meanings, clichés, and the automatisms of consciousness. Plato’s “Idea,” Kant’s “thing-in-itself,” Hegel’s “dialectic” and “aufhebung,” Auguste Comte’s “positivism,” Nietzsche’s “overman,” Husserl’s “intentionality” and “epoché,” the “noosphere” of Vladimir Vernadskii and Teilhard de Chardin, Viktor Shklovskii’s “defamiliarization,” Martin Heidegger’s “Dasein” and “Zeitigung” (“temporalizing”), the “existentialism” of Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida’s “différance” and “deconstruction” – it is precisely via such concept-words that systems of thinking new to their time are integrated.
A neologism sums up the movement of a thought as it traverses the stages of proof, unfolds amid voluminous verbal constructs, and can ultimately find no better embodiment than that single word that immortalizes it – as if signaling that this thought abides in the language itself, and not just in particular texts. The word “idea” (eidos), which Plato elevated to a philosophical category, has now absorbed Plato’s thought for good – and whoever uses this term becomes a Platonist whether s/he wants to or not, even if s/he adheres to anti-Platonic views. Language caters to the most varying worldviews, which are capable of arguing with one another only because they speak a common language. It would be difficult to imagine the thought of Vladimir Solovyov or Mikhail Bakhtin without the verbal constructs they introduced into the Russian humanities: vseedinstvo, “all-unity”; Bogochelovechestvo, “Godmanhood”; sofiologiia, “Sophiology”; mnogogolosie, “multivoicedness” or “polyphony”; uchastnost’, “particity”; khronotop, “chronotope”; vnenakhodimost’, “outsidedness” or “exotopia”; etc.
Some of the terms included in this dictionary, concepts I have introduced in previous publications, are already in use in the humanities or have begun to be so, which attests to their heuristic potential. For instance, the following coinages of mine appear on tens of thousands of Russian– and English-language web-pages:
– metarealizm, “metarealism” (first appearing in a publication of 1983), a literary and artistic movement of the 1970s-90s.
– transkul’tura, “transculture” (1988), a space where various culture meet.
– videokratiia, “videocracy” (1992), the power of visual imagery over the public consciousness.
– khronotsid, “chronocide” (1999), the abolition of temporality in totalitarian as well as postmodern currents of thought.
Also defined in the dictionary are such well-known concepts as “charm,” “creativity”, “fate,” “game,” “love,” “sense,” “silence,” “soulfulness,” “wisdom,” and “word,” – but interpreted anew in the context of contemporary theories of the humanities, or endowed with a terminological status they formerly lacked. Everyone knows that philosophy is the love of wisdom, while psychology is the science of the soul. The word is one of the basic concepts of linguistics, just as love and creativity are of ethics and psychology. But the very disciplines called upon to study these concepts do not in fact pay them much attention. It would be a rare thing to find, in a philosophy or psychology dictionary, entries on wisdom or the soul – the very concepts are considered syncretic and “pre-scholarly.” Although they are constantly used to define many other terms, they themselves implicitly lie outside the bounds of “scholarly” philosophy or psychology. One of the goals of the Predictionary is precisely to articulate these blank spaces in the terminological system of the humanities and to introduce into that system concepts formerly perceived as purely intuitive and belonging to everyday language (“quirk” or “twist” [vyvert]; “depth”; “the interesting” [interesnoe]; “event”; “packaging” or “wrapping” [upakovka], etc.).
Bertrand Russell had occasion to lament that the system of philosophical categories typically features only nouns (“being,” “consciousness,” “idea,” “matter,” etc.), omitting verbs, prefixes, and other auxiliary parts of speech indicating deeper conceptual connections. The Predictionary attempts to fill in this blank and introduce more dynamic and relative concepts expressed by verbs, prepositions, prefixes and other parts of speech and grammatical units (“to eventify,” “in,” “hyper-,” “proto-”, “nega-”, etc.)
The dictionary may be used as a tool for the methodological renovation of the humanities in their current period of relative stagnation, as they risk turning into what the study of dead languages has become for modernity – the sign of a cultural refinement already superfluous in a technocentric age. The dictionary demonstrates that the humanities harbor great creative potential, and that their role is not limited to the study of the past; in fact, they shape the future of humanity, its pathway to self-awareness and self-realization.
This book is the result of its author’s half-century of work in various fields of the humanities. I studied philology at Moscow State University and originally specialized in literary theory and aesthetics. In the 1980s, in connection with the formation of new literary and intellectual movements in the USSR, I began to consider the question of how the humanities, including philology, aesthetics, and poetics, might influence the development of literature itself and enable such emerging currents thereof as metarealism and conceptualism to define themselves. In the 1990s, I dealt with issues of postmodernism and the emergence of a new cultural formation coming to take its place (After the Future, 1995; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, 1999). At the same time, I was drawn to the interdisciplinary approach involving the juxtaposition and interplay of different cultures, particularly Russian and American culture (Transcultural Experiments, 1999). My interests gradually migrated toward the field of philosophy, especially modality theory (Filosofiia vozmozhnogo [The Philosophy of the Possible], 2001), as well as modern theology, with a focus on researching the spiritual condition of a post-atheist society (Religiia posle ateizma [Religion After Atheism], 2013). In the 2000s, I began to be interested in linguistics and its transformative potential – how it can influence the development of language and broaden its lexical-morphological system (Dar slova. Proektivnyi leksikon russkogo iazyka [The Gift of the Word: A Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language], 2000-16). Finally, in the last fifteen years I have become increasingly concerned with the fate of the humanities as a whole and the potential for developing humanities-based practices and technologies capable of influencing the life of society. This is the subject of the books Znak probela. O budushchem gumanitarnykh nauk (Mapping Blank Spaces: On the Future of the Humanities, 2004), The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (2012), and Ot znaniia – k tvorchestvu. Kak gumanitarnye nauki mogut izmeniat’ mir(From Knowledge to Creativity: How the Humanities Can Change the World, 2016). This dictionary thus stands as a sort of synthesis of my previous works in various fields of the humanities.
This dictionary is doubly authorial: all its entries were written by a single author; and most of the concepts and terms featured in it belong to the same person. It was conceived not only as a reference aid, but also a form of advancing new ideas that affect various fields of the humanities. The dictionary as a whole is a sort of a