The focus of this article is on the mechanisms behind the bibliometric indicators (principally journal impact factors and researchers’ h-indexes) used to quantify the creative productivity and academic influence of scientists and scientific periodicals. The increasing use of these indicators in the academic world is associated with the increasing dominance of the managerial approach to higher education and science based on the neoliberal logic of efficiency and cost optimization. A critical analysis of the algorithms that calculate these indicators demonstrates a number of asymmetries and false logical assumptions that have a negative impact on the dynamics of scientific research, especially in the field of social sciences and humanities. For example, the well-known ratings lag between journals in the hard sciences, social sciences and humanities results from the way “impact factors” (the arithmetic mean of the number of mentions of articles of a particular journal over a two-year period) are calculated without considering the differing tempos at which these disciplines evolve. Considering the “h-index” and the basis of its calculation, a no less fundamental flaw of axiology can be found in the very preconception that a quantitative indicator speaks to the real value of a scientist’s work for their particular field of research. Moreover, the possibility of manipulation, sewn into the very nature of bibliometric indicators, has generated a significant number of tricks and schemes that allow for specific researchers and institutions to increase their ratings. It has likewise been used by university and academic administrations as a tool to formally legalize often discriminatory decisions in the allocation of resources.

The cognitive and social structures, and publication practices, of the humanities have been studied bibliometrically for the past 50 years. This article explores the conceptual frameworks, methods, and data sources used in bibliometrics to study the nature of the humanities, and their differences and similarities in comparison to other scientific domains. We give an historical overview of bibliometric scholarship between 1965 and 2018 that studies the humanities empirically and distinguishes between two periods in which the configuration of the bibliometric system differed remarkably. The first period, from 1965 to the 1980s, is characterized by bibliometric methods embedded in a sociological theoretical framework, the development and use of the Price Index, and small samples of journal publications from which references were used as data sources. The second period, the 1980s to the present day, is characterized by a new intellectual hinterland — that of science policy and research evaluation — in which bibliometric methods become embedded. Here the metadata of publications becomes the primary data source with which publication profiles of humanistic scholarly communities are analysed. We unpack the differences between these two periods and critically discuss the analytical avenues that different approaches offer.

This discussion of the Moscow Philosophical Circle is devoted to issues of bibliometrics in the Russian humanities. It examines the strategies of extra-academic authorities to find the most effective tools for funding scientific research and the response of academic authorities focused on maintaining the status quo. Despite the declared status of bibliometrics as a sociological tool for adequate evaluation of scientific effectiveness, representatives of the Russian humanities academy believe that de facto formal adherence to bibliometric indicators not only does not correspond to the idea of separating high-quality from low-quality science but, on the contrary, produces research of low scientific value, carried out merely for bibliometrics itself. The debate questions whether bibliometrics will lead to the death of the scientific traditions, including the national one. Is the practice of bibliometrics a tool for destroying research in local languages and styles of thinking? How is it possible today, in the era of scientific globalization, to speak of science in terms of tradition, individual schools, and the like? Does this practice conceal much more serious problems facing the humanities than that of bibliometrics itself?

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the McDonaldization of modern Russian university research. In contemporary sociology, “MacDonaldsization” is the process of restructuring social institutions on the principle of the fast food restaurant. Four components are fundamental in this process: efficiency, accessibility, monitorability, predictability. According to its creators, they provide businesses with high quality and market success. Thus, modern universities are gradual ly turning into corporations where a researchers’ effectiveness is assessed by the number of standard publications and citation indices. This corresponds to the interests of educational administrators and allows them to make use of funds and conserve financial resources in accordance with their conception of efficiency.
The McDonaldization of science and education is a global trend that came to Russia in the 2000s. In the Russian Federation, it is carried out through the introduction of “performance-based contracts”. This makes the remuneration of university instructors contingent on publication activity. Preference is given to publications in journals included in the databases of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Russian Federation, as well as the Web of Science and Scopus. Heads of educational departments of universities are convinced that the citation index is a reliable criterion for determining a scientists’ relevance in the research community. When financing universities, the Russian state gives preference to those with the highest citation indices.
However, the McDonaldization of research leads to the disappearance of science as a vocation and the product of creative activity. It is impossible to evaluate the content of scientific works using bibliometric methods. Thus, scientific activity is bureaucratized and commercialized. Science is turning into a state corporation that distributes state-allocated finances according to purely bureaucratic criteria.

Although science has been a formidably successful force of social and technological development in the modern era, and a principal reason for the wealth and well-being of modern societies in comparison to those of the past, its current status in society is characterized by profound distrust. According to the prevalent discourse, science is insufficiently productive and needs stricter governance and bureaucratic management, with performance evaluation by the means of quantitative metrics as a key tool to increase efficiency. The basis of this notion appears to be the belief that the sole purpose, or at least the key purpose, of science is to drive economic growth or, alternatively, sustainable development in combination with economic growth. In this article, these beliefs are analysed and deconstructed with the help of a theoretical toolbox from classic sociology of science and recent conceptualizations of economization, democratization, and commodification of scientific knowledge and the institution of science. This connects these beliefs to broader themes of market fundamentalism and to the metric fixation of current society. With the help of a historical-sociological analysis, this article shows that the current ubiquity of performance evaluation in science is pointless, for the most part, and counterproductive, and that this state of science policy is in dire need of reevaluation in order to secure the continued productivity of research and its contribution to social and technological innovation.

In this contribution I argue that the humanities, just like any other mature field of knowledge, should have or develop a system by which its research can be assessed. In a world that increasingly asks for the justification of public spending, where less and less public money must be distributed among more and more social players, where research funds are being concentrated and distributed on a highly competitive basis, we as humanists cannot shy away from research assessment with the argument that “we are different from the rest” or that “we don’t need it”. Of course the humanities are a distinct member of the body of academic knowledge, but that holds true for every discipline. If we agree that, for instance that bibliometrics does not suit most players in our field, the question becomes: what would better suit us? Case-studies? This contribution also contains a warning: let us stop arguing about the language issue. English is the modern Latin of academia and its use enables us to communicate with one another, wherever we are or whomever we are. Without providing definite solutions, my argument is that we humanists should take the steering wheel ourselves in developing adequate forms of research assessment. If we leave it to others, the humanities will end up looking like arms attached to a foot.

Walter Benjamin’s early text The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy (1916), offered to the reader, reveals the complexity of reasoning and uniqueness of style at the intersection of philosophy and literature, which are characteristic of the author’s later works. Thus, asking about the role of language in trauerspiel and tragedy, Benjamin does not limit himself to an analysis of these genres, but draws a metaphysical picture of nature that is striving to be expressed and therefore entering the “purgatory of language.” It is the vicissitudes of this movement that form the context for a new definition of the phenomena that are of interest to Benjamin: dramatic art in general, tragedy and trauerspiel in particular, feelings of grief and lamentation as its expression, meaning, and history. Seeing the principle of trauerspiel as a drama of grief in the very disparity between word and meaning, Benjamin poses the question of overcoming this opposition in art. The solution to this problem leads the author to music as a “saving mystery” of trauerspiel: in a dramatic game, heard in the fullness of its sound, a word can be filled with meaning in a new way granting nature the deliverance of expression beyond the category of meaning. Therefore, if tragedy establishes the regularity and unbreakable order of speech, then trauerspiel sets it in motion, freeing the grief of nature and dissolving it in music as the “language of pure feeling.” The essay “The Meaning of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy” not only makes it possible to better represent the range of problems and cognitive processes in the philosopher’s early works (especially in the context of the work “On Language in General and on the Language of Man,” written in the same year), but it can also be considered as one of the first sketches of Benjamin’s book The Origins of the German Baroque Drama (1925).

The article provides commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy” and is meant to clarify the key problem of this text as well as the thought processes that, according to Benjamin, can lead to its solution. Having previously outlined the general profile of the published work, the author addresses Benjamin’s distinction between tragedy and trauerspiel. He interprets it in light of the philosophy of language, more specifically the role assigned to the word in each of these dramatic genres. For Benjamin, the word in trauerspiel is not reducible to its meaning but acts as the bearer of a “metaphysical” feeling experienced by the creation itself — such a drama appears as a stage in the ascent of nature from its immediate silence to a pure divine language. In trauerspiel, a being strives to express itself and simultaneously, encountering meaning as a boundary and ultimately the impossibility of genuine expression, is filled with sorrow. This process, however, has dialectical meaning for Benjamin: there, where conflict between word and meaning disrupts any relation of linguistic reference, the free play of these elements becomes possible. Its main result, what should be heard by the viewer in Benjamin’s opinion, is the sound of speech itself, its music, in which the signifier and signified coincide expressing nature on the stage with purity that is inherent in the language of divine names. In the final part of the article, this transformation of dramatic speech into music is contextualized and correlated with the question of language’s expressive possibilities, which allows one to see the rooted philosophical and aesthetic relevance of Benjamin’s work.

The article presents the possible paths to the philological development of the first translated and little-known work of Walter Benjamin The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy. Based on the key problematics of the fragment, associated with the expressive possibilities of language, and by focusing on the features of the unusual philosophical speech, it is possible to consider the text as part of the tradition of poetic speaking in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne. The resonance of readers’ impressions of Benjamin, connecting the works of Shakespeare and Goethe with the legacy of expressionist poets, speaks to the philosopher’s unique understanding of the verbal side of his own reflections. A striking organic fusion of the factors “how is it said?” and “about what is said?” in Benjamin’s text is demonstrated by a selective analysis of individual phrases supported by appeals to the modern theory of poetry. Balancing on the borders of philosophy, literature, and philology, Benjamin aims to create the optimal conditions for language, traditionally striving to demonstrate the maximum extent of his capabilities in the artistic sphere. Such an orientation of the philosopher determines the fundamental similarity of his early fragment and the elements of the history of literature that are relevant today — from reflections of Friedrich Schlegel “On Incomprehensibility” and Heinrich von Kleist “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech” to Joseph Brodsky’s famous formula “the poet is the means or instrument of language” and the broadest ideas about literary communication that form modern experimental creativity. As a result, it turns out that Benjamin’s legacy is a well-functioning prism that allows us to consider how the painful feeling of insufficient verbal resources and the acute need for diverse attempts, through poetic means, to study and expand the expressive possibilities of speech are manifested in art of the XX and early XXI centuries.

Finding himself in a new city during the quarantine, the author offers a reexamination of local cultural mythology and a cursory mapping of those contexts made available to him within walking distance. In the case of the Marseille district of the Vieux Port, this turns out to be the quarter where Walter Benjamin wrote several essays. These include, in particular, “Hashish in Marseille” written, so to speak, hot on the heels of a walk through the same quarter. During an exercise in local literary lore, a decision was made to keep bibliographic notes from this area, the cycle of which is titled “Self-Storage Unit”. The first “storage unit”, in the very first report from the Marseille Alcazar library, becomes the almost legendary journal Esprit. In the recent summer 2021 issue, entitled “The Politics of Literature”, the author Michel Murat analyses the journal’s own history in its relation to literary circles and post-War French history. As one of the stakes of the “politics of literature”, the circulation of Roland Barthes’ concept of “white writing” (écriture blanche) is analysed. Another publication, by Giselle Sapiro, examines the history of the concept of the engaged writer, as well as the models of institutional and rhetorical behaviour that oppose it. From concepts of aesthetes, notables, avants-garde and polemicists, the author of the review attempts to select those that may be relevant to the subject of our national of literature from the same period.