The humanities and the ‘capturing of reality’: Ryszard Nycz’s theoretical practice

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.