Can the Humanities survive distance learning?
                                                                                                               

1. Introduction | 2. Distance learning and Humanities | 3. A question of prestige 

Anyone who has fallen in love with an email correspondent will know that the technology of distance learning does nothing to curtail transference, of course, and I have tried to imagine a learning situation in which electronic cathexis would enhance humanities knowledge-production.  But humanities work is only partly about eliciting emotion from the student-subject.  More importantly, humanities work entails disciplining that emotion into a studied, studious engagement with cultural materials, and this requires someone who can direct inquiry, ask questions, call on others in the class, manage and redirect individual emotion so that it becomes impersonal, or, as I have already suggested, intersubjective.  When it is conceptualized as an intersubjective project, in other words, humanities work requires a teacher—at least until the point at which the student learns how to be her own teacher, and how to make cultural materials her classmates and interlocutors.  When I think about the dynamics of email, which entail both temporal deferral and a false impression of intimacy, I cannot imagine how a distance-teacher could elicit emotion in such a way as to direct and manage it.  I cannot imagine how the student could feel sufficiently engaged to want to take the necessary risk.  Is she does become engaged, I cannot imagine how a teacher could manage that engagement sight unseen.  In short, I cannot imagine how a distance teacher could do anything except correct errors in the information the student supplies.

The obvious response to my worries is to say that the kind of work I have described cultivates and requires “advanced” humanities skills, which would never be the business of teaching in a distance format.  Just as the “basic” skill necessary to solve problem sets in calculus could be taught more efficiently in a distance format, this argument goes, so the basic skills that are preliminary to such inter-subjective analysis could be taught through digital technology.  Such a division of labor would free the literature professor, for example, from having to teach basic writing.  Such a division of labor would free the professor of history from having to recite dates and test her students about famous names.  If humanities professors could assume that students had acquired basic writing skills and mastered certain data before they entered the classroom, wouldn’t that mean that the kind of inter-subjectivity I have described would be easier to cultivate, since language skills and facts would already be at every student’s command?

The pleasure of reading

Let me be clear about what I am saying.  I am arguing, on the one hand, that what is often called “basic writing” is inseparable from the work I’ve associated with the humanities.  On the other hand, I’m also arguing that the humanistic activities of conserving, appreciating, interrogating, and interpreting cultural materials is inseparable from writing, which is never simply “basic” but always already interpretive and expressive.  One simply can’t conserve, analyze, appreciate, interrogate or interpret anything without a medium that links one subject to another.  In the humanities, the medium of expression is language and all language is expressive.  One’s ability to think in language, and to marshall language that negotiates desire, is therefore inseparable from one’s ability to do humanistic work. Language use that is simply “correct” (as in grammatically correct) is not so much the basis upon which more sophisticated work is founded but part of the process by which one learns to shape and discipline inquiry inter-subjectively.  

If we begin to use a technology that leads us to conceptualize some languages uses as “basic,” then we are in danger of imagining that only explicitly interpretive or expressive language uses engage inter-subjectively with others. Accepting this false dichotomy is the first step toward relegating what may initially seem like “advanced” language skills and knowledge projects to the dustheap of the purely subjective—that is, to what is now thought of as worthless because tainted by subjective desire.  The mode of inquiry and the theory of knowledge I have associated with the humanities provide the only bases for a defense of a conceptualization of knowledge that links the knowing subject to the objects she seeks to know.  If we allow the mode of inquiry deployed by the humanities to be subdivided, so that its “basic” components can be taught by rote, we risk losing the only credible alternative to an objectivist epistemology (and everything that follows from it). 

If basic writing is separated from other uses of language, moreover, then students will have little incentive to cultivate more sophisticated skills—unless, of course, they elect to enroll in advanced humanities courses.  The tendency to devalue humanistic inquiry and sophisticated language use might well intensify as learning ventures are further subdivided—into campus-based education, where classroom interaction and advanced humanities classes would still be possible, and distance learning, where students would have their grammar corrected and their fact-retention tested.  Following the paradoxical logic of scarcity, of course, it might well be the case that, as increasing numbers of students received their education through distance-learning venues, the social status of all campus-learning ventures (including advanced humanities work) would initially increase (relative to “mass” education).  In the long run, however, the value of advanced humanities work would not necessarily be enhanced, despite its relative scarcity, for, on campuses, humanities work would continue to compete with the sciences, whose ability to attract government and corporate funding virtually guarantees its continuing prestige.  Thus, I can imagine a situation in which even though advanced humanities work was available to a smaller proportion of the educational community, its value would continue to decline—because, having jettisoned its connection to basic skills, it would seem like a frivolous luxury whose knowledge claims could not rival those of the sciences.