Digithum 3

Can the Humanities survive distance learning?

Can the Humanities
survive distance learning?
Mary Poovey
Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge
Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University

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

Introduction

By way of preface to my observations about the humanities and distance learning, let me make an important qualification. Scholars in the humanities have long benefited from digitalization and computer technology, and nothing I say is intended to downplay the value of digital archives of secondary and primary sources. Humanists use digital data bases to locate articles on cuckoldry in Shakespeare’s late plays, they use digital text archives to gain access to variants of Browning’s The Ring and the Book, and they use email to communicate with scholars all over the world. In these ways, digitalization has enhanced research in the humanities, and I have no reason to doubt that this will continue to be the case.

The concern that lies behind my title does not reflect on these uses of the new technology. Instead, I am worried about two quite different matters. I am concerned, first, that if universities try to divide “the humanities” into “basic” and “advanced” skills so that the first can be taught in a distance format, then the very nature of the knowledge that the humanities can claim to produce will be undermined. This concern is related, but not identical, to a worry that, if humanities skills are divided into two, then the value accorded to skills considered “advanced” will decline. Even if the humanities survive distance learning, in other words, the humanities that will remain may differ in crucial ways from the work we now associate with this mode of inquiry.

My second concern is that, if universities devote resources to developing distance units (in continuing education, for example, or professional studies), they will inevitably begin to promote subjects that can be conveyed in this format. In most cases, these subjects will be disciplines or professional subjects where “information” is transmitted and in which a student’s success can be judged in quantifiable terms. If universities develop distance units, in other words, they will need to develop and market courses that are appropriate to distance instruction. Even if the revenue obtained from distance units is initially used to underwrite the less lucrative, more costly, in-class instruction that I think essential to the humanities, in the long run, institutional inertia will tend to privilege the revenue-generating unit over its more costly counterpart. Thus my concerns are two-fold: first, I fear that, if brought into humanities instruction, the pedagogical methods best suited to distance learning will undermine the premises upon which this mode of inquiry is based; and second, I worry that if universities promote distance learning ventures—even at the periphery of the liberal arts core—then the momentum of the university as a whole will gradually shift to those disciplines that are amenable to distance instruction.

Humanities in the medieval scriptorium

I’ll take up these worries one at a time, but, first, I need to clarify what I mean by “the humanities.” For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not simply referring to the traditional humanities disciplines: literary studies, language studies, history, philosophy, and art and music history. I don’t want simply to define “the humanities” as a certain group of disciplines because some of these disciplines are moving away from the mode of inquiry I associate with the humanities (analytic philosophy, for example), while other disciplines are suspended between a scientific and a humanities paradigm of knowledge-production (anthropology and linguistics come to mind). Instead of simply invoking the university division of the humanities, I want to emphasize a certain mode of inquiry that has historically been associated with these disciplines. The work associated with this mode of inquiry includes conserving, analyzing, appreciating, interrogating, and interpreting cultural materials from all periods and cultures. I want to argue that this work does produce knowledge as well as conserve culture. Unlike the knowledge generated by scientific and social scientific disciplines, however, the knowledge produced in humanities disciplines is not progressive or even, necessarily, cumulative. The knowledge produced through a humanities mode of inquiry, moreover, does not claim to be exclusively object-centered, as scientific knowledge purports to be. Instead, humanities knowledge is partly about the subject who conserves, analyzes, appreciates, interrogates, and interprets cultural objects. More precisely, humanities knowledge is about the relationship between the subject who conserves and interprets and the objects that are being conserved or interpreted. Thus, humanities knowledge is inter-subjective knowledge; it is about the relationship between the present and the past, for example; and it can challenge the binary opposition between subject and object in ways that scientific knowledge can (or at least will) not.

Because the mode of inquiry I am associating with the humanities is inter-subjective, it entails self-consciousness on the part of the knowledge-producer. The work necessary to produce this kind of knowledge is not limited to the collection and transmission of information, nor can it be tested in ways that yield quantifiable results. Students learn how to reflect on themselves and their relation to cultural materials partly by reading examples of such inter-subjective, self-conscious interactions with culture and partly by participating in conversations that promote self-awareness and critical insight. What psychoanalysts call transference is an important component of student participation in such learning projects because the kind of work I am describing entails risk—not so much the risk of being wrong as the risk of self-revelation. In such conversations, a good teacher will not only promote transference as an aid to risk-taking (the student reveals herself because she desires the teacher’s love); in such an encounter, the good teacher will also control the student’s transference, so that the projection that enables self-reflection does not ricochet into its paranoid or self-critical counterpart.