Communication approach in the humanities

The article analyzes the communication approach in the humanities as one of the key methodological strategies of contemporary social-philosophical inquiry. It demonstrates that from the second half of the twentieth to the early twenty-first century communication has been reconceptualized not as an auxiliary channel of information transmission but as a fundamental principle of social and cultural organization that shapes forms of knowledge, identity, and symbolic practices. The paper reconstructs the main trajectories in the development of the communication approach: the media-ontological (M. McLuhan, F. Kittler), the normative-discursive (J. Habermas), and the mediatization-oriented (A. Hepp, Couldry, J. van Dijck). Particular attention is paid to the development of the communication approach within the Russian humanities, especially in the works of S. V. Tikhonova, where communication is conceptualized as a communication space endowed with its own structure, dynamics, and ontological status. Drawing on contemporary social-philosophical studies of historical memory, digital identity, medicine, law, and ideology, the article demonstrates the heuristic potential of the communication approach as an «umbrella» interdisciplinary methodology. It concludes that under conditions of digitalization and mediatization of the humanities, the communication approach enables a shift in analytical focus from the reconstruction of objects and contents to the examination of the conditions of production, circulation, and social validation of meanings, thereby providing an adequate framework for analyzing contemporary social processes.

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