2. Perspectives and Disciplines

I wrote AI; I wrote humanities. I intentionally adopt these words to partake in a dialogue that began before I joined in: I situate myself through the reuse of a lexicon, and neither can I wholly dispel its previous connotations nor do I seek to uphold them all. In a way, I am both accepting and rejecting the contours of the discourse preceding me. I cannot seriously believe I shall settle the conversation once and for all. I am aware of the inevitable semantic expansions that will affect the writing and the reading of my text (including misunderstandings, redefinitions, co-options). Through this, I am affirming ideas that are “mine” or, at least, I perform what “I” am as a scholarly person. In all these dimensions, then, what I do pertains to the humanities: understood as a dialogical endeavor where the past (such as a past sense or interlocutor) could be present or future, the process of signification is ongoing; polysemy and contradictions are unavoidably lodged into the most pristine argumentation—the conduct of research neither obliterates its own subject nor transcribes it. This is the humanistic perspective.

This perspective is not unique to a particular division of knowledge. For instance, one could legitimately sustain that a good experimental psychologist should be aware of the trajectory of her line of inquiry, would be open to refurbishing her concepts, and is positioning herself in a collective debate. Of course, but, on the one hand, the humanistic viewpoint is not equal to “the humanities.” On the other hand, the scientific perspective (to which the sciences should no more be exclusively identified) is less invested in the semantic openness of the discursive, which is why formalized languages are so central to the sciences. Moreover, a scientific concept, once it is said to be past, is to be done with. There is no use for gestalt or cybernetics in contemporary cognitive science or for phlogiston or ether in today’s physics. Their associated theories could be revisited at some later stage to the condition of additional articulations, although they are not readily active the way any humanistic idea proffered yesteryear could again become instantly relevant. Finally, the excess and defect of meaning are often seen as a limitation to science. I distinctly remember that many philosophers and theoreticians see their pronouncements as eternal truths and that the inner fault lines of reasoning have been routinely described as remediable impediments. Such a conception, for being internal to the humanities, has also become autonomized as an axiom of modern science. But, when uttered in a text, therefore relying on the unbounded semantics of “natural” languages, it serves at best as a verbal indication of “higher” truths (the additional layer of formalization to escape the “vicious circle,” as in Alfred Tarski’s propositions) and, more generally, as a bifid, reversible, deconstructable assertion whose accuracy should therefore not only be rationally assessed but also experienced (thought, lived, expanded, debated, traversed).1 When chemists Roald Hoffmann and Jean-Paul Malrieu speculate that “all of theoretical science will respond to its confrontation with AI by developing still further its aesthetic side”—that is, by emulating “the imaginative power of art” and the crafting of a “near-infinite density of signs”—they posit a consolidation of science (or at least one way to do it) within the humanistic perspective.2

Indeed, the viewpoint I tentatively qualified pervades the arts, including literature that—like scholarship, though differently—is expressed within the (im)possibilities of human language. Many “professional humanists”—that is, today for the most part, academics—tend to shy away from the inclusion of the arts as such in the definition of their own field. It bears repeating that a perspective could be more easily shared than, say, formal disciplinary training or a position in a university. Severing the artistic reality from the praxis of humanistic inquiry and turning oeuvres into reified documents or mere social symptoms that could neither influence nor enlarge their own commentary is an act of amputation. In 1938, Erwin Panofsky wrote that, in art history, “intuitive aesthetic re-creation,” “just as any ‘ordinary’ person does,” and “archeological research are interconnected.”3 The shunning of artistic creation and “re-creation” probably explains how some so-called experts could, apparently in good faith, authenticate the palimpsest painting named Salvator Mundi and sold for more than US$450 million by Sotheby’s in 2017; it is only by no longer looking at the piece that otherwise-competent scholars would attribute it to Leonardo da Vinci. We should equally avoid thinking there now exists a mandatory research style we have to use in writing and that other poetics are antiquated. Plato’s dialogues are plain philosophy today as they were yesterday, although their conversational mode could disqualify them from being published in 2025 professional journals. The thirteenth-century Japanese Mumyōzōshi is a text of literary criticism, despite the now rare use of a narrative to introduce thoughts on novels. The standardization of academic prose is just another consequence of the relegation of the artistic in articulation with scholarship. Obviously, the mode of exposition I chose for this book is both illustrative and performative: privileging the dominant tone of academic rhetoric to convey the differential regimes of thought and knowledge would be self-defeating.

The well-known temporal complication I alluded to (the becoming present of an otherwise past idea or text) particularly opens itself to mystifications we could call, in a parapolitical lexicon, “conservatism” and “progressism.” The conversative take will associate the humanities with tradition, seeing the contemporary as one transient instant in a chain of events, references, and books. Notwithstanding, at the end of the twentieth century, the passionate pleas of authors such as Hans-Georg Gadamer or George Steiner, it looks like the hardline commitment to tradition is now relatively scarce in the West.4 This is different elsewhere, and one could think of the ongoing debates in China about the need to restore a tradition-based view of the classics (the one that had been eliminated during the Cultural Revolution) culminating in the elaboration of nation(al) studies (guóxué) to account for a five-thousand-year-old civilization. The election of history as the ruling discipline of the so-called human sciences, very commonly experienced in Europe—turning literary criticism and poetics into the history of literature, philosophy into the history of philosophy, the study of music or the arts into history of music or art history, and so on—coupled with an unprovable creed in the historicity of all things, is just a loose variation on traditionalism. This stance, be it articulated by self-avowed leftist scholars, is conservative in its depiction of the present as being conditioned by the past, the latter being kept and curated to explain, legitimize, and logically contain the former. There is no now here, but the prolongation (traditionalism) or the emanation (historicism) of the occurred.5 The progressives are symmetrically stationed: the past being tied to our present, we have the duty to assess the historical by what we hold to be our contemporary standards. In practice, this option paves the way for a quasi-constant rehashing of the moral, political, social, technical, intellectual superiority of the time we fathom to belong to. The endless indictment of the past (including of those of our contemporaries who are reputedly backward and seemingly inhabit the dark ages) has become a specialty of American academia. It is ill-advised to call this attitude “presentism,” as, in the end, it mainly consists in installing everything (but the absolute tip of our current enunciation) in caducity. This attitude is at least as unable as the conservative humanities to produce anything new, for the enemy from the past has to be maintained and even resurrected to allow for an nth exorcism. In this process, all too often, the scholarly personhood that is asserted is usually a reinscription of a socially preconceived category, perhaps complemented with the memory of subjectification episodes. The supposedly progressive orientation of the humanities may seem more accessible to strike an alliance with AI since computerized technologies appear to be the sign of our era. Nevertheless, conservative motivations are perfectly equipped to tolerate a nondialogic recourse to AI in the guise of corpus digitization, data mining, and other automated searches, all shiny gadgets that are tasked with materializing the tradition.

Besides viewpoints, we find the disciplines—that is, modes of organization for knowledge with their own values, methods, questions, training procedures, habits, routines, preferred objects, stylistic decisions, paths of validation, and argumentative techniques. In first approximation, it would be easy to state that the relevant disciplines are only united by their belonging in the institution (schools, universities, centers, journals, publishing companies, the media, economic and political structures of power). We would then assume that history, cultural anthropology, or musicology have nothing in common except their own positionality. The social innervation of the disciplines, set in a context of multifold validation and solidified in a particular organization of labor and production, has a weight on their content, approaches, and motivations. This is not exactly news. More than two millennia before Michel Foucault’s own crude linkage between knowledge and politics, Aristotle noticed in the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics that the conduct of scholarship is ultimately tied to what the City would allow, favor, or tolerate. This is why political science, the philosopher says, is the most “architectonic” of all disciplines.6 One step further, social determinations—I did not say determinism—are active in the very training and maintenance of (humanistic) research. This often leads to the recitation of articles of faith that reflect the presuppositions of the profession, or the trending on social media, and are intellectually adventitious. Conversely, many new ideas boil down to the import of other social dogmas that are magically endowed with a groundbreaking function by virtue of their being external to the disciplinary edifice. We cannot stop there. Even if the humanities were originally named and fostered by institutional agency, this would not prevent us from constructing meaning therein and displacing the preset.

Another, less external, approach would define the humanistic disciplinary program negatively, noticing that, at least within modernity, it does not require formalization, quantification, or experimentation. In the meantime, there seems to be a widespread agreement according to which these last three features, separately or, better, conjointly, qualify the other disciplines (now regularly called the “sciences,” be they further explained by the terms natural, mathematical, engineering, or social). This presentation is not without merit, although the lack of requirement says very little about what happens to a humanistic discipline when it uses traits that are associated with indices of scientificity. Is philosophy, if being conducted more geometrico, or through logical analysis, or with experimental verifications, a step toward the sciences? Or is it a speculative exploration? Is an interdisciplinary project involving literary scholars and information scientists doomed to separate the quantitative from the qualitative, or to muddle the positivity of its results, or to dissolve the aim of interpretive scholarship by virtue of using numbers? In fact, experimentation, formalization, and quantification are common scientific strategies, to varied degrees depending on the disciplines, and of utmost importance for their intellectual pursuits. They are dependent on separate, more constitutive, imperatives, such as predictability or falsifiability, that are largely foreign to the humanities. Thus, numbers, formal notations, mathematical operations, or digital computers, by themselves, do not turn a scholarly endeavor into a science, nor do they annihilate the humanistic disciplinary. The latter is rather oriented by aims such as interpretive nonreductionism, the creation of signification, or the exploration of exceptions. Could a scientific imperative be inserted into a humanistic discipline or vice versa? Possibly, but the moment we reject that research be wholly constituted by its social and political conditions of emergence, we imply that, structurally speaking, the differential channeling of the disciplines have their coherence. Therefore, a historian or a literary critic could dwell on regularities and patterns, although they will never be the best at this game if they do not adopt the tools furbished by the sciences for examining such recurrences.7 Further, they might simply lose themselves if they end up believing, because of the epistemic framing they selected, that nothing lies outside of what their instruments can register.8