Retooling Remaindered Writing Styles in a Time of AI

Introduction: From New AI to Old Cultural Studies

I find myself increasingly bumbling around within what Stuart Hall (the late great founding figure of cultural studies, not the shamed 1970s TV presenter) would have called a new ‘conjuncture’. Or perhaps it is what one of Hall’s own elder colleagues, Raymond Williams (another key figure in the pre-history and early emergence of cultural studies), might have described via his enigmatic phrase, a ‘structure of feeling’. This new conjuncture involves the emergent force of AI as it starts to transform so many landscapes, my own work landscape included. Regarding AI in the university, most of the attention to AI has taken the form of a moral panic about student ‘cheating’. However, it is also changing the way we research, the way we write up meeting notes, and more. This new ‘conjuncture’ (Hall) gives rise to a new ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams) – a new ‘everyday/everything-ness’ that, as it emerges in the present, is unclear – involving emotional responses from terror and nausea to excitement and thrills, and practical responses ranging from evangelical celebration to luddite rejections and ostrich avoidances.

I think I have bounced around between all of the emotional responses. I have inhabited many of the ostrich and luddite positions. But I have not bought into the evangelical discourse. Nor do I buy into the ‘ideology critique’ style of argument which says that if we refuse it or reject it, we can make it go away. I can see that generative AI has both pitfalls and possibilities for teaching and learning. It might take teaching away from teachers or – worse – learning away from learners.

So I have been pondering and researching what changes it is either necessary or desirable to make to my own teaching, and – crucially – assessments and marking. In my last post on Substack, I wondered out loud about possible ways to work with rather than against AI in teaching and (crucially) assessing film, media and cultural studies courses. At the end of that post, after weighing up the well-structured word salad that my own Google NotebookLM folder on ‘AI in University Assessments’ had served up to me, I wondered whether, in setting assessments, I might simply ask students to do ‘something more personal, higher-level, unique and sophisticated’ than AI could generate:

So, for instance, I could close down the chance of students delivering generic essays on ‘The Last Samurai and Orientalism’ or ‘Aladdin and Hollywood Racism’, etc. – by asking students for something more specific and personal like ‘Choose a film that you once loved (or hated) and analyse it in terms of one or more of the theories covered on this module. Reflect on the reasons for your initial feelings about or interpretations of the film, and also reflect on how your chosen theory/theories have changed that’. (Bowman 2025)

It is likely that I will do something like this. It may or may not work. It will be an experiment. There will always be students who embrace the syllabus and new technology and give it all they’ve got. Then there will be students who only embrace the syllabus and grudgingly type up their hand-written essays into electronic forms. Then there will be those who copy and paste ChatGPT verbiage into a document and hope that will do. And so on. I accept all of this.

What seems more significant is that it will definitely call for a different kind of work than I have normally asked for from students. What I normally ask for boils down to the formula ‘write an essay analysis of film/media text x in terms of cultural theory y’. Ideally, my new assignments will call for students to step into a different way of thinking, engaging with both film or media texts, and indeed with ‘theory’, in a different way. It may also call for different ‘methods’ – both pedagogical and compositional: autoethnographic, affective, reflecting on memory, the relations between emotions and times and places, and so on.

There is also a quiet wager in there, of course, that because I will be asking students to factor themselves into this – in effect, to write about themselves – that they will be less inclined to ask AI about it. We all love thinking and talking about ourselves, right? It’s exhilarating, and there’s nothing more interesting in the world. Why subcontract that out? But, we will see.

I also wonder: Will my ‘new’ approach elicit ‘new’ styles of thinking, writing and assessing? Or ‘old’ ones? In times of crisis, in new conjunctures, in which the structure of feeling is defined by uncertainty, perhaps the only place we can look is back. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that this is the defining characteristic of ‘cultural renaissances’: a radical rereading and passionate interrogation of the past in order to try to get a new handle or angle on the present. What we may produce may feel to us like an authentic repetition or replaying of the earlier ethos, but it will be a kind of misunderstanding, a reinterpretation: like 1970s Teddy Boys vis-à-vis 1950s Teddy Boys vis-à-vis prewar Edwardian sartorial norms.

So, what rereading of the old will play an active part in the new? I teach film and media theory, as well as cross-cultural ‘East Meets West’ film and media studies. However, I identify as ‘cultural studies’. When I was promoted to professor, we decided my title would be ‘professor of cultural studies’. We decided this right at the moment we dropped the term ‘cultural studies’ from all of our taught programmes. This did not result in any reduction of teaching for me, and I very much enjoy ‘being’ something that has no clear connection with anything obvious that we do at my work. I enjoy this because I identify with the history, challenges, struggles and achievements of the field known as ‘cultural studies’.

This is relevant here because it is to the history of cultural studies that I am inclined to look for ideas about the present. By happy coincidence, after writing that last post, I started to reread the back catalogue of Ben Highmore, professor of cultural studies at Sussex University. Ben is an exemplary scholar of cultural history and everyday life. You may also have seen him saying interesting things about everyday life in 20^th century Britain on BBC television programmes. But mainly, he is an exemplary scholar of cultural history and everyday life. (Sometimes I will call him ‘Ben, sometimes ‘Highmore’, depending on whether it feels to me like I am writing in academic mode or as a kind of informal aside at that moment.)

What I was happy to notice was the way that throughout numerous works over the last ten to twenty years, he returns frequently to the question of topics like what academic work is or could be, what cultural studies is, was, or could be, what things like ‘assessment’ are, what teaching is, has been, might become, and – of course – what a ‘conjuncture’ or ‘structure of feeling’ might be.

Consider this early passage, in which he sets up the way he will cover such matters as the event of a white British (presumable) racist eating a searingly hot curry in an Indian restaurant:

The second task [of this article] is more speculative (and perhaps more precarious) and consists of considering a range of theoretical orientations that will open up this event to understanding. I want to be careful here: what I don’t want to do is to offer an explanation of the event. In a certain light explanation just comes to hand too easily: a man walks into a restaurant orders the hottest curry and eats it. A more or less frail male and national ego (a post-imperial national ego) reasserts its imagined superiority by incorporating and overcoming the culture of the other. End of story. While this explanation may be true, to some degree, I’m worried by the whole business of explanation, of the way that it reifies such events and closes down on their processual possibilities. And this is what might make my project more precarious in that it wants scholarly study to loosen its bonds with explanation and to pursue a path in which the event sets in motion a theoretical speculation that clearly exceeds the event itself: in this case to consider the role of sensual pedagogy in everyday life and in the making and unmaking of ‘actually existing’ multiculturalism. This paper will start with a description and then open out its purview to look at the kinds of contribution that cultural theories of disgust and gustatory relish, of sensual habit and of intercultural eating can make for understanding the processual nature of such eating events. (Highmore 2008, 382)

See what I mean? Beautiful writing, so expansive and thought-provoking. What, no explanation in an academic essay? What do you mean?! What do you mean by processual possibilities? What’s all this about speculation? And so on. We could talk about this for hours – and we should – but not right now. Here, I want to try to stick with the topic of AI, assessments, academic work, and that ‘certain indefinable something’ about cultural studies – a structure, a feeling, if you will – that could perhaps help us to navigate a new (or perhaps uncover an old) path through this new environment.

To get there, I first want to take a short walk through the rather well-established terrain of the origin story of cultural studies. I want to explain to those who may not know much about cultural studies not so much what it ‘is’ but more why it began. This will be a rather condensed synopsis, a kind of quick overview of a certain impulse that I think defined early cultural studies. Our guiding thread through this walk is the theme or concept of exclusion. After we have done this, I will return to the question of writing, assessing and AI. It’s fine if you skip (indeed, exclude) this longish middle section.

The Exclusion of Cultural Studies

The formation and initial orientation of cultural studies can be understood in terms of perceptions of exclusion. A key theme of the origin narrative is that the traditional university disciplines of the era (the late 1950s and early 1960s, in particular) excluded so much. For example, the discipline of history was said to be dominated by the perspectives of the dominant, indeed of the dominators. There was no history of the underdog, by the underdog, of the dominated, by the dominated, the oppressed, the subaltern – no ‘history from below’. Sociology, too, was regarded as dominated by nineteenth century monocultural theories of class that seemed blind to the new de facto multicultural realities of everyday life in the post-WWII UK, and that were completely ill-equipped to comprehend new social and cultural nuances and complexities. Similarly, the canons of art and literature, and the texts taught in schools and colleges, were dominated by white male authors, along with a few ‘exceptional’ white women. All others were excluded – as was critical attention to the reasons for the exclusion of such others from the realms of art and literature.

Why no working class authors? Why so few women? Why no non-white greats? And why indeed was so much of the visual culture and books that were actually consumed by so many people excluded from the very category of art and literature? And, of course, what of popular culture? Why was it excluded? Such questions were largely excluded from the fields of art and literature, or deemed answered in advance by a tacit belief in the value of Matthew Arnold’s tautological argument that cultured people just ‘know’ what is ‘the best that has been known and said’.

To pose further questions of inclusion and exclusion would be to pose questions that were not part of (not ‘internal to’, not the ‘proper focus’ of) the study of art or literature. Such questions can easily be deemed to be external to the proper business of the study or art or literature. In the 1970s and 80s, scholars like Jacques Derrida fervently disputed such alibis, arguing that the question of what ‘is’ philosophy or literature versus what ‘is not’ philosophy or literature is actually an abiding concern of such fields themselves. Nonetheless, by and large, to study art or literature was to study one or more of its agreed objects. The decision about what could be included in the category of acceptable object was not open to democratic deliberation, but rather determined from on-high by university value creators and syllabus gatekeepers. In effect, the status of such exclusions was reminiscent of today’s legal superinjunctions, in which not only are you not allowed to talk about a particular issue, you are also not allowed to talk about the fact that you are not allowed to talk about it.

Cultural studies was at root a project focused on – animated, exercised by – such exclusions. This was a focus that, I have argued before, is what brought it into a kind of alignment or attunement with such ‘Continental’ or ‘poststructuralist’ scholars as Jacques Derrida, even though cultural studies scholars would often critique or disdain such ‘high theory’. Nonetheless, the shared argument of ‘British’ cultural studies and ‘Continental’ poststructuralism (along with US ‘comp lit’) was, in effect, that such exclusions are ultimately political. The exclusion of women from the canon is gender political. The exclusion of working-class cultural production and consumption from the category of valuable art or literature is class political. The exclusion of non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-European identities and activities from all spheres is racially, colonially or imperially political. And so on.

The next stage of the argument – one that it is easy to overlook, and that is routinely excluded from consideration in today’s ‘inclusivity’ discourse – is that exclusion is unavoidable. ‘Constitutive’ is the word used by poststructuralist scholars. For theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and others, the inevitability of hierarchies, exclusions and local biases – even if the good guys were in charge – is a matter that should provoke a vigilant reflection on ethics and an interminable openness, or attempt to listen to excluded or minority entities and voices. To some, this sounds radical. To others, it sounds like management or PR – or indeed, to coin a phrase, ‘alterity washing’.

Awareness of the political character of exclusion is what enabled the notion of ‘cultural politics’ to emerge in such fields as cultural studies. Thinking about cultural politics became expressed through the notion of hegemony. This is a term adopted from the early 20^th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. In Greek, the hegemon is a prince, leader or guide – someone you follow willingly, even passionately, or enthusiastically, and who wields power on this basis. This power – hegemonic power – is not harshly imposed from above on an unwilling people; it is often passionately embraced, enjoyed by them. Thus, Gramsci used the metaphor of hegemony to encapsulate the complex dynamics, layers, seams, networks and relationships of power that permeate a society in myriad ways, in terms of institutional values, norms, biases, inclusions, and of course exclusions.

Based on this, over years and decades, many works of cultural studies have focused on such matters as exclusion and hierarchising in all kinds of areas of culture and society: the power dynamics structuring, developing, maintaining or subverting hegemonies (or the status quo) in multiple aspects of gender, class, ethnic, and other relations. But, at the same time, and because many of its founding concerns were related to the exclusions perceived within that powerful social and cultural institution known as ‘the academy’ (universities and colleges in their discipline-defining and scholarly agenda-setting capacities), the other key focus of early cultural studies was the university itself. What is taught, how? What is excluded, why?

This focus on the university (again, one shared by British cultural studies, Continental philosophy, and US comparative literature) has been appraised as either a radicalisation of politics, or its evacuation. This was encapsulated in such barbed quips as ‘they used to want to seize control of the state, but now they only want to seize control of the syllabus’ (alternative punchline: ‘the English department’), or ‘to the barricades with the floating signifier!’ Nonetheless, just as you don’t make satirical jokes about things that aren’t on your mind to some extent, the cultural studies style argument about the ‘cultural politics’ of exclusion from important social institutions like the university (among others), and important realms like what gets taught and hence what is institutionally valued, recognised, seen, known and talked about (in other words, ‘the syllabus’) – gained huge traction.

Comparatively quickly (well, quickly in ‘university time’, which is different to other forms of time), and after a long march through the institution, it arguably became the case that ‘everyone’ ended up doing a version of cultural studies. This is not to say that egalitarian political projects were invented by cultural studies, or within the university. Far from it. But cultural studies can certainly be regarded as the academic-institutional crystallisation or crucible for the exploration of broader (often pre-existing) cultural political movements, including feminism, gender, sexual and other identity politics, anti-racism, civil rights, postcolonial and subaltern struggles, and so on.

Either because of the success of the cultural studies paradigm, or because of the pressures exerted on institutions such as the university by movements like feminism and anti-racism as they gained a foothold in more and more contexts across society in diverse ways, over time, more and more disciplines and departments became aware of and responsive to institutional biases, hierarchies, value systems, and so on. Terms like ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘institutional racism’ slipped into language and became not only familiar terms but also pragmatically active agents within and across the institutions of society. (Stuart Hall was on the panel that reviewed the London Metropolitan Police after the racist murder or Stephen Lawrence, the panel that coined the term ‘institutional racism’ and hence put it into wider discursive circulation.)

At the same time as this, there is an argument that the political force of such entities morphed somewhat, as they became dislodged from emancipatory narratives and became either individualised warrants for litigation or consigned to matters either of institutional hygiene (think: ‘Guys, we’ve got to be cleaner than clean in this regard!’, or: ‘He said what? You could take him to the cleaners for that!’). This is not to devalue the importance of such terms entering into moralistic or politico-legal discourse. It is merely to indicate that – to use a distinction made by philosopher Jacques Rancière – in entering wider public discourse, such entities also lost some of their ‘political’ (i.e., socially disruptive and reconfiguring) force, as they become instead ‘police’ (i.e., bureaucratic, management, organising, stabilizing) matters.

I said earlier that cultural studies’ focus on the university has been appraised as either a radicalisation of politics or as its evacuation. There is too much to say about this debate here. But for now, let’s propose that the ‘cultural politics’ and ‘hegemony’ arguments about exclusion that (also) gave rise to a kind of paradoxical ‘navel gazing’ focus (in cultural studies and poststructuralism) on the university itself might be considered both hyper-political and hypo-political. At different times and in different places: it just depends. Let’s propose that things can be both/and, and not just either/or. Both cultural studies and deconstruction always tacitly believed in the ‘both/and’ perspective. As Stuart Hall was wont to say, cultural studies needs to operate on at least ‘two fronts at the same time’: focusing at once on wider cultural issues and on ‘domestic’ matters of its own and other academic fields’ teaching, research and other orientations. (Jacques Derrida once also argued that ‘and’ was more correct than ‘but’.)

Much has been written (especially within cultural studies) about the political dimensions of all of this. However, once we get past (or even before we broach) the question of whether studying something or not studying something is ‘political’, I want to point to another concern with ‘exclusion’ that was arguably at the heart of cultural studies, even from its prehistory; but a form of exclusion that is not often talked about. This is a form of exclusion that Ben Highmore calls ‘remaindering’.

Remaindering

‘Remaindering’ is a term normally applied to book selling. It involves shifting left over (remaining) stock of a book at any low price to reduce losses. But the term can also have other allusions, connotations or senses. For instance, in translation studies there is said to be a remainder when something from one language does not translate completely into another language. In maths, the remainder is something left over when one thing does not divide into another completely. More broadly, the remainder is the part of something that is left over when other parts have been counted out, shared, divvied up, completed, used, allocated, dealt with, etc.

Ben Highmore activates all of these senses in his frequent use of the term ‘remaindering’ when discussing issues in culture and cultural studies. In his use, remaindering has connotations ranging from: selling something off quickly; disposing of something that has become devalued in the process of (actually because of) an act of dividing up; evoking something that nonetheless remains despite all efforts to divide everything up neatly and tidily, ‘without remainder’.

In his genealogical study of the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ – a key term coined by Raymond Williams, one of the founding genealogical figures of cultural studies – Highmore uses the word ‘remainder’ in the following way:

‘Structures of feelings’ are, for Williams, what get remaindered when professionalised specialists get their hands on culture and divide it up into distinct realms of ‘psychology’, ‘society’, ‘economy’, ‘history’, ‘art’ and so on. ‘When one has measured the work against the separable parts’, writes Williams, ‘there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling…’ (Highmore 2016, 149)

Highmore adds a footnote nearby, in which, along with providing a reference to the quotation from Raymond Williams, he uses the word ‘remainder’ again:

At roughly the same time Henri Lefebvre could write a similar definition of everyday life: ‘Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by “what is left over” after all distinct, superior, specialised, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined as a totality’ […]. A similar sense of everyday life as something that often gets remaindered by the social investigation designed to apprehend it is also evident in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life […]. Thus we could suggest that, on one level at least, there is a family resemblance between the terms ‘structures of feeling’ and ‘everyday life’. (Highmore 2016, 162–63, n.10)

In terms of our current theme (exclusion), Highmore thus isolates and identifies an early (even primordial) cultural studies concern with exclusion: another type of exclusion, one that is in a sense pre-political, and one that arises in and through the very act of dividing up the human world into discrete disciplinary realms.

In this, Highmore follows Rancière, who has argued that any and all acts of dividing, organising and ‘counting’, when applied to society, involve the simultaneous and paradoxical production of an exclusion – or, that is, a failure both to recognised and to count all ‘parts’ of society correctly, without leaving any remainders.

The exclusion that Highmore homes in on is the one that Raymond Williams was trying to name from the 1950s onwards with the phrase ‘structure of feeling’. As my earlier quotation from Highmore (and Williams) indicates, the structure of feeling of a time and place (we might call it the affective atmosphere of a conjuncture) is what is lost – what slips through the fingers, or is thrown out with the bathwater – when the entire world gets supposedly neatly partitioned off into discrete disciplinary categories – psychology for knowing the mind, sociology for knowing society, economics for knowing the world of money and trade, history for knowing the past, art for knowing… well… art, and so on (Highmore 2016, 149).

Rancière’s writing tends to focus on the other side of this coin, looking at the effects of what is produced as the outcome of our institutional-academic social-conceptual division and disciplinary organisation of perception. He calls it ‘partage’, or what his translators have termed the ‘distribution of the sensible’. What we can perceive, what we can think, the way we think, our conceptual categories – these are all organised by the distribution of the sensible. This is something that is variable. George Orwell arguably intuited this back in the 1940s, with his dystopian vision of Big Brother trying to eradicate the very possibility of ‘thought crime’ by restructuring language so that dissent simply could not occur to people.

In his essay, ‘Aesthetic Matters: Writing and Cultural Studies’, from 2017, Highmore reflects on what different genres of writing encourage, enable, produce and – reciprocally – deter, close down or exclude. He reflects on the establishment and settling down into ‘business as usual’ via the establishment of forms of syllabus and writing for assessments on cultural studies courses, and the ways that the styles of writing demanded of students have differed radically from the conventions used by those they were reading. Laura Mulvey, for instance, and Pierre Bourdieu each became ‘authorities’ on the courses he taught, and students would routinely reference them. They still do, to this day. However, Highmore notes, the styles of writing of both Mulvey and Bourdieu were radically different both from each other and also from the type of writing that was being required of students. This is because the time and place of the generation of these ‘authoritative’ essays were radically different from that of university essay production. Highmore notes that, evaluated by today’s university standards, Mulvey’s famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ – the one that made famous the term ‘the male gaze’ – would have been marked very low indeed because it only has one reference to another book. But, today, ‘good academic work’ has to reference lots of books and articles:

These conventions and procedures resulted in the ‘undergraduate essay’, which might give rise to the ‘postgraduate essay’, which might, if no one was particularly vigilant, give rise to the ‘doctoral thesis’. I don’t want to dismiss these standardized forms: Raymond Williams shows us that those who rail against the conventions of the day are necessarily offering another set of conventions to take their place which will at some point seem ossified and routine (Williams and Orrom 1954, pp. 15–25). The undergraduate humanities and social science essay, standardized in so many ways, is a pedagogic machine which is also an enabling machine. The conventions of the ‘case study’ and textual analysis enables students to focus on specific arguments and objects. The undergraduate essay is a humility machine in that it shows them (via aspects like a literature review) that the students are working within a field that has already been well cultivated. It is an investigative machine because it encourages students to stress-test their interpretations of the world by connecting them to theoretical procedures. It is also a negatively disciplinary form, of course, and disenables students from randomly stringing together opinions that aren’t supported or informed by reading or research. (Highmore 2018, 9–10)

In his reflections on styles of writing and of what is encouraged and what is deterred and even excluded by different styles, Highmore offers a compelling case for a renewed attention to the question of what we are seeking to ‘teach’ and to ‘assess’ – one that is hugely pertinent today. Highmore’s own essay is wide-ranging and uses a variety of styles of writing and modes of address to make its points performatively, and often emotionally, as well as intellectually or ideationally. I cannot hope to do justice to such a piece of writing here, and I do not want to try to rehash its wonderfully nuanced and sophisticated elements. (It is available, open access, free to download, via Ben’s Academia page.) However, Highmore advocates for forms of cultural studies writing that aspire to several conditions: complexity (in attempts to articulate conjunctural configurations, especially perhaps in attempts to capture ‘structures of feeling’), vividness (when describing the ‘worldliness’ of cultural forms), and a kind of popular realism (as an attempt to talk beyond academia and to constitute new audiences).

Highmore published this back in the heady days of 2017, back when things like Generative AI were largely unheard of and definitely not a pressing problem or part of the structure of feeling. However, I would propose that Highmore’s attention to excluded genres of writing and subordinated forms and styles of teaching and learning might offer the greatest hope for the development and expansion of our students’ and our own capacities in these early days of AI.

My hunch – my feeling – emerging through trying to rationalise moral panic type journalistic fears, tentatively experimenting with different AI tools, trying to think about what they might take from and add to a learner’s experience, and so on – is that all of a sudden, the types of alterity, creativity, experimentation and ‘eccentric angling’ in relation to the world that Highmore wrote about in 2017 (writing then almost as if he was merely trying to record some senses and scenes from an already vanished – hegemonized, recolonized – era) are today more valuable resources to draw upon than ever.

Perhaps the era of analysis and explanation should be menaced somewhat at its margins, at least in some places. Perhaps the essay form is one place to begin. Perhaps we need not retreat into oral examinations and timed exams on paper to the quiet shuffling of invigilators’ feet on parquet flooring. Perhaps, as we seem to exist more and more in the moment of a ‘vanishing present’, now is the time is it most urgent to try to capture ‘a whole way of life’ in snapshots of thickly descriptive writing of different creative literary genres.