15. An Opening

The humanities I vouch for are concerned with the interplay of norms and exceptions, giving specific credit to creation, not only as an object of study but also as a thinking experience and experiment. The scrutiny of the extraordinary leads to the insight that not all things are predictable, so that an excess, or defect, may be other than noise or the anecdotal. Something else may, and does, happen, and it is also our task to respond to such a provocation of the unknown. Through textual scholarship and the arts of reading, meaning and signification are maximized, thereby becoming life-changing, mind-altering for those performing them now. As a field, the humanities are committed to the past but by its special activation in the present and future. Because their knowledge remains deeply embedded within human language, they are tied, through their very poetics, to the manifold capabilities of verbal forms and therefore entertain a particular relation with the literary, as a textual display of thinking. Because humanistic discourses are epistemic, they are not free-floating: they are set in a social-political architecture, and they are organized, and even use techniques; but their insert in the City does not define them, and neither the channeling of the discipline nor the recourse to special skills are an end. So qualified, the humanities are not reducible to what AI currently stands for, as a theoretically sustained technology of mental implementation in, and by, the social realm. But yes, uncontestably, there are other conceptions of scholarship that have been widely developed over centuries and that heavily contributed to the current situation. In most, if not all, cases, these other conceits are almost fully compatible with AI. Even an apparent emphasis on the gulf between us and our machines for the purpose of “humanism” could, in fact, serve the computerized future, in supporting an illusion about our own capabilities and in feeding a logic of exclusion. We are often mechanical and automatized, we may be “reprogrammed”; we cannot defend a generic humanness and merely oppose it to the algorithm or juxtapose the two. Today and tomorrow, AI exposes how ordinary we usually are; but we also may be more than this. I contend that the compatibility between some, maybe dominant, self-qualifications of the humanities (of the human) and the program of artificial intelligence can only lead to the actual absorption of the former by the latter. More guidelines and policies will not give us more relevance if what we do is so shallow that it could be easily outputted by an information system. The political fighting of Big Tech by academics is literally senseless if it takes all manners of humanistic pursuit to be equivalent; no, they are not, and it is both logical and just that those who demote creation and promote repeated patterns would be replaced by a more performant machine. De profundis. This is the cause for my paradoxical optimism: not only are we in a position to outsource the bureaucratic aspects of our research, but, through what it is not and will not be, AI reveals by difference where the stakes are in the discursive disciplines. The inner strife is in the open.

It behooves us to manifest, show, and demonstrate how humanistic inquiry is a form of exploration and speculation—not only of explication and derivation—how it confronts us with significant plurality, how it expands our reflexive modes of existence, how it makes us think beyond the boundaries of usual thought. As for their methods, objects, styles, or even institutions, it is not my place to determine them, and I would be weary of any appeal to reconstitute a vast field of knowledge on the basis of one, supposedly major, problem (such as environmental, decolonial, medical, public, digital, or cognitive humanities). I am not advocating for AI (or anti-AI) humanities. On my end, I consider we must ponder all these elements of difference in an undisciplined way, going to the limits of the structured modes of research, and craft some mosaic knowledge that does not shy away from techniques or the sciences. I see a need for transcultural expansions and encounters, for the interpretive intelligibility of the incommensurable. I believe in a continued displacement, by the humanities and beyond, of what is thought to be human, thus benefiting the affirmation of singularities. But this is just “me,” rather the me that exists today through these words, and I do not even know where I will be taken tomorrow on the path I showed. A recent proposal about the future of social science was to coordinate empirical efforts so that evidence-based results would stem from chosen projects and reach a valid statistical threshold.1 Vast international groups, such as the European Union, already took that route. Would such a level of bureaucratization favor inventiveness in social science? We may doubt it. Assuredly, a similar disposition, for the humanities, would run contrary to the resistance to standardization that the current state of our AI societies paradoxically incite us to stress. So, no, in this moment, there will be no twenty-point program to conclude my book.

We live in symbolic, cultural, linguistic worlds. We may not be the only animals doing so, but, through this, we specify ourselves. We further exist through differentiation. As long as our prejudice does not prevent us from being tested by the experience of plurality, as we may retain the occurred and revive it, as we cultivate our resources for creating and making life livable, we have to compose with the nonfinite possibilities of our alteration and otherness. This is where a maximalist conception of the humanities may help with furthering ourselves. AI also specifies us: it is a series of tools and a discourse in action that we invented and whose purpose is neither to serve nor to conquer us but to dominate us or, rather, to make a both efficient and truncated representation of the human our dominant paradigm for self-reference. This is a reality, though not the only unescapable one. We do have the choice, and the humanities have a creative role to play, now as before. The time of AI is here. It is a closing. It is an opening.