Catching up with Lauren Shohet

Dr. Lauren Shohet has been crisscrossing the country lately presenting on Shakespeare, Milton, AI, and more, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with her and discuss her teaching and scholarship.

To begin with, Dr. Shohet gave a lecture at the Huntington Library on January 31^st on “(In)Visibility and Mediation: Milton’s Eve,” in which she also discussed vanitas paintings (more on this later). Then, in February, she attended the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco, where she gave a talk as part of the book history discussion group. In addition, while in San Francisco, Dr. Shohet also presided over Milton Society events. Finally, in early April, she attended the Shakespeare Association Conference in Denver and presented on Shakespeare and AI.

Regarding mediation and Milton’s Eve, Dr. Shohet explained that she is in the middle of a long project that examines mediation in Paradise Lost--as she put it, “What it is for angels and for the Son of God, to be mediators between God the Father and humans” Dr. Shohet explained that she is interested in communication as a form of mediation, in how any kind of communication is a kind of translation, and how to “get an idea from one mind to another mind.”

“So, my claim,” said Dr. Shohet, “is that mediation is inherent to the creaturely condition, whether you're looking before or after a fall, and that the importance of mediation makes us think differently about Eve's association throughout the epic with mediation. So we're, I think, more accustomed to seeing the ways that Adam's more direct access to God and to knowledge and to language diminishes Eve—which I think is true. But I also think that the epic shows that mediation is essential for being a creature in relationship—also of the most exalted kinds of relationship with the divine, with the world, with other people—and that Eve's expertise in mediation makes her an admirable and useful resource.”

Regarding the medieval vanitas paintings, Dr. Shohet explained that she is interested in a passage in Paradise Lost in which Eve examines her reflection in a pool and notes that the pool “to me seemd another Skie.” Although traditionally viewed as an instance of Eve looking for Heaven in the wrong place, Dr. Shohet is more interested in the idea that “When she says that the pool, to me, seemed another sky, she's aware of the fact that she's perceiving, and that her perception might not be the only perception, or might not be complete.”

Dr. Shohet then noticed that the image of Eve looking into the pool recalls a 17^th century tradition of vanitas paintings, in which ephemeral things (like hourglasses and bubbles, but also scientific instruments and books) are contrasted with the divine and eternal (usually a skull is also present to remind us of our own mortality). “So I started thinking,” noted Dr. Shohet, “about how Eve looking in the pool reminded me of a lot of these vanitas paintings, some of which are by women artists, many of which do feature women. Because the viewer who's worried about Eve maybe being vain or narcissistic, or not understanding quite where to look for heaven, detects a little skull in that pool, detects mortality in that gaze.”

During her next trip, to the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco, Dr. Shohet spoke about Paradise Lost and network theory, which she finds to be “a really intriguing way to think about medium.” As Dr. Shohet explained it, “Instead of thinking about signs and signifieds, or thing and word, I'm interested in these reciprocal, distributed ways that meanings are created by unpredictable constellations of different entities. And those entities can be matter, they can be word, they can be interpretive protocols, they can be allusion.” With regard to Paradise Lost, Dr. Shohet discussed network theory in relation to figurative language, “as something that pulls together all kinds of different frames of reference, and then, what guidance does the reader get in thinking about how to make meaning out of it?”

Finally, at the Shakespeare Association Conference in Denver, Dr. Shohet presented on Shakespeare and AI in the context of Othello. Her presentation focused on the way search algorithms and large language models depend on our input to make meaning; as Dr. Shohet put it, “What AI does is predict the statistically likeliest next word.” Meanwhile, “In the play Othello, the vice figure Iago manages to completely mess with the protagonist Othello's sense of who he is, who other people are, how he knows what's true, and what meaning is, by just repeating little bits of his speech back to him… If you ever had someone just repeat the last word of every sentence you speak back to you with a question mark, it's really unsettling… So, my paper's about ways you can ask students to use the play as a usefully unfamiliar context where they can evaluate how search algorithms and social media feeds draw on what they think should come next to manipulate them. And then, on the other hand, how they can use their own experience of, say, social media feeds, to get deeper inside the operations of the play.”

At the end of our interview, I asked Dr. Shohet for her general thoughts about AI.

“I am worried about AI,” she said, “…and I think it's a really great opportunity to denaturalize our fantasies that we had non-iterative ways of knowing things before. You know, knowledge is always constructed, and it's constructed iteratively through feedback you get on performing a hypothesis, and then you perform it again. Just watching AI do that lets us say, ‘oh, that's how gender's constructed.’ That's how, right? You experiment with something, you reiterate it, you try it again. And that, conversely, becoming critical consumers of how that works in one arena can carry over to the other, and we can just ask more questions, both with and without AI.”

Vanitas by Antonio de Pereda