Digital Futures: Towards a New Definition of English Studies

I was asked to speak, alongside Professor Claire Hutton, at this #EnglishCreates event Digital Futures: Towards a New Definition of English Studies. The title had the feel of a manifesto, so in my introductory remarks I found myself manifesting - both in the sense of trying to express or make manifest why the present moment feels so anxious for us, and presenting my own manifesto for the future. Here it is, written up from the rather ad libbed spoken intro.

English Studies has always been a subject in renewal, looking for ‘new definitions’ for itself. From its emergence as an agent of colonial rule and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through New Criticism, New Historicism, post-structuralism and so on there’s always been a sense that as well as just doing English we need to define what we are about when we do English.

But while the need for definition has not been suddenly prompted by digital technology, it does feel like our current moment is rather different to those earlier periods of renewal. Today we’re confronted by a much more radical uncertainty. We’re being asked to think about ‘Digital Futures’ – but not only do we not know what the future will look like, we don’t even know what’s happening in the present. What will the next iteration of ChatGPT offer next week? How many of the essays many of us have recently read in exam season have been produced by AI? How do we prepare our 2024 intake of undergraduates for a career if we don’t know what jobs will exist when they graduate?

The intensity and speed with which questions like this are arising do make our time different to earlier periods when English academics also sought a new definition for English Studies, but informed by more publicly visible and understandable events.

For example, in 1937 the New Critic J.C. Ransom had just moved from Vanderbilt to Kenyon College when he wrote his essay ‘Criticism Inc.’, which opens ‘It is strange, but nobody seems to have told us what exactly is the proper business of criticism’. He argued that in the absence of a clear sense of purpose, ‘Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.’ He said this in part because he saw – almost physically in the concrete being poured for new laboratories – that the ‘academic’ was increasingly becoming associated with the ‘scientific’ or the sciences, and that unless English got its act together and put itself on an equivalently rational footing as a specialised discipline rather than something that could be just as easily done by amateur readers, it was going to lose out. It would become what some would today call a ‘low value’ or ‘non vocational’ subject. Hence the cheeky business-friendly ‘inc.’, or incorporated, in his title.

Or in Stephen Greenblatt’s preface to his 1987 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which is commonly regarded as the early manifesto and practice of New Historicism, he remembers coming of age intellectually in 1975 during the Vietnam war and following the resignation of Nixon. While the protest placards were sprouting on the lawns of University of California, he encountered Foucault and became convinced that we need to look at all the social and institutional forces that shape a person and that shape works of literature, not just the economic forces that Marx had described. Doing this would, he thought, give English back its role and self-definition. Its purpose is to help us to understand ‘how we have become the way we are’ and therefore to ‘escape what we detest and embrace what brings us wonder’.

In rereading both these examples – there are more one could draw on of course – one feels English scholars thinking about how to re-define the subject because the events are close to hand. These are things that they know about and understand because they are on the shared ground of politics and society where English already exists as a subject, and indeed these are things they know and understand because they are literally happening before their eyes on their campuses.

What’s different today is that so much of what is happening is out of our sight. The drivers for digital developments are physically and metaphorically concealed in the black boxes of server farms. They are economically concealed in companies like OpenAI whose ethical and governance structures are so opaque not even Sam Altman seems quite to understand them. The way students are engaging with them are concealed because it’s really hard to do robust and ethical scholarship on social media, or AI, or software use.

But asking ourselves what’s going to happen or currently happening with AI may be the wrong framing, which puts AI at the helm of the driverless bus shipping humanity to some unknown destination. The more important question, an inversion of the first, is what will happen to us humans, and here we can offer not an answer, but at least the implications of an answer.

In a book length critique of AI entitled What Computers Still Can’t Do the author has a wonderful quote that the biggest risk of AI is not that it will replicate or exceed the human mind, but that the human mind will bend to accommodate it. He says that the danger is “not the advent of superintelligent computers, but of subintelligent human beings.” That book, by Hubert Dreyfuss, was published not in 2022, but in 1972. Given that an analogous thing just happened with the last two decades of social media and mobile phone addiction which has made us all rather subintelligent it seems incredibly prescient. But it also means that it’s incumbent upon us to avoid becoming subintelligent given what might happen next.

And – you can see where this is leading – that’s where the superpower of literature comes back. When we watch a Shakespearean tragedy or read a Percival Everett novel it’s like being confronted with a superintelligence, not just in the author (or, as it would now be unfashionable to say, genius), but in the near-incomprehensible social and psychological complexity of the human world realistically captured within it. Great literature is where the superintelligent human lives, and reading and thinking about it is our buffer against becoming subintelligent human beings.

That’s why although we might not know exactly what digital tools we will use to teach and research English in future, there will still be this thing that interests us above all. Part of the new definition will still be the old object of study.

And as such although the new digital methodologies will be very distinct from today, so too we’ll continue to use some of the same established ones. If he were teleported forward 80 years JC Ransom would probably find much of what we do in English departments unrecognisable, but he would still find academics and students doing close reading. We may not all of us be proclaimed New Historicists, but all of our teaching and research is heavily invested in the placement of texts in contexts, not least because we have vast digital archives that can collate historical and literary material in a single browser tab. Greenblatt wouldn’t have anticipated this would happen in 1987, but the digital methods we all use today would still feel familiarly New Historicist. We may not all be self-designated Postcolonial or Feminist critics, but academics and students are absolutely committed to decolonising the discipline, to ensuring our reading lists and approaches are diverse and representative. We’ve already seen why that work is all the more important given how generative AI manipulative misrepresents identity as its creating new art.

In the same way, if you took us forward in time from 2024 the tools and methodologies of English will be different and we will have different labels or jargon to express what we are doing when we study literature. But we will still also be doing some of the same as we strive to remain superintelligent in the face of machines.