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Timothy Richard WUTRICH
Department of Arts, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio U.S.A., and CITIDEP-USA. E-mail: wutrich@ohiou.edu
ABSTRACT
The intersection of dramatic and philosophic literature has been studied by scholars in important works such as Eric Bentley's The Playwright as Thinker, Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy, and the volume edited by J. Peter Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. What these scholars and others like them have noticed is that in European intellectual history from the time of Aeschylus onward the progression toward democracy has often been accompanied by the parallel development of dramatic literature, philosophy, and theatrical performance The information revolution of the late twentieth-century has changed the way thinkers conceive many human institutions. Indeed CITIDEP has as one of its goals the development of participatory democracy throughout the world with greater Internet access and a wider use of information technologies. While this objective is commendable, it is certainly not above discussion and debate. I argue that the communal experience offered by live drama or Socratic teaching in the classroom, cannot, indeed, must not be primarily "virtual," but if it is to be a significant expression of the living human spirit must be the product and the process of a localized and real human community.
For Pedro Ferraz de Abreu:
Filhos cegos dos gregos,
a noite de seu Dia é que nos vê.
-- Alberto de Lacerda
I am a professor who teaches courses in the arts and humanities and whose research crosses traditional borders in the university curriculum. General education and interdisciplinary studies have constituted the heart of my professional life for over ten years. Current discussion in the United States about information technology and general education tend to overlap. Moreover, since general education includes the development of citizenship in its program (Said 4), the connections between general education, information technology, and citizenship appear to be important and worth reflection, discussion, and debate. In many ways technology has made life easier for those of us who work in the arts and humanities as teachers, writers, or artists. Word processors have largely replaced typewriters, theaters rely on computerized lighting and software has made the laborious chore of transcribing music simple. Who could possibly be skeptical of the new technology and why? Since many attending this conference are specialists in computer technology who quite rightly have been considering the ways in which information technology, a science, can serve democracy, a social science, I offer my remarks today as a humanist who has experimented with the new technology, who has used technology as a teacher and a scholar, who continues to adopt the new technologies for his teaching and research, and who also remains skeptical of the claims that information technology will significantly alter art, education, or democracy for the good.
Technology has affected art, education, and democracy from the beginning of western civilization. If we understand the concept techne as Martin Heidegger does, who, in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" reminds us that "techne [for the ancient Greeks] is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts" (Heidegger 318), then a fundamental technology would include the invention of writing which permitted the great oral epics, the poems of Homer and Hesiod, to be recorded. Two millennia later Gutenberg's invention of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century permitted a machine to print multiple copies of a text more rapidly than was possible for a single scribe or even a group of scribes working together.
Communication technology, however, need not only refer to printed materials. In the loosely organized, fiercely independent Germanic states of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the young idealistic poets, playwrights, and philosophers of the Sturm und Drang used the theater as a forum for social reform. Friedrich Schiller, in his aesthetic writing of 1784 wrote that he
hoped that the stage will equally combat mistaken systems of education. This is a subject of the first political importance, and yet none is so left to private whims and caprice. The stage might give stirring examples of mistaken education, and lead parents to juster, better views of the subject. Many teachers are led astray by false views, and methods are often artificial and fatal. (Schiller 444)
A great deal has been written over the past ten years on the technology-arts-democracy nexus. Unfortunately most of what I have read or heard (and I admit that I am a relative newcomer to the subject, this being my first essay on the topic) has disappointed me. The debate on the importance of the new technologies for the humanities has been printed largely in black and white. There is no middle ground. Humanist scholars tend to panic and condemn technology as the cyber-monster that will destroy the humanities and then, perhaps, humanity; or scholars have bought in completely to the theory that there can be no turning back, that technology has indelibly affected the arts and humanities and that this is a good thing because the western humanities have been decaying for a long time anyway and really need to be rejuvenated. Least I, too, be guilty of fallacious either-or thinking, let me share with you a sampling of what I have read in the recent academic press on technology, teaching, and the arts.[1
Lynne Schrum's overview of technology and teaching presented in the chapter "On-Line Education: A Study of Emerging Technology" from the book ]Adult Learning and the Internet seems to me to be endemic of the enthusiastic rush to embrace the new technologies without always considering how this will substantially change the subjects taught. Schrum has read widely on the use of technology to teach and notes that "the literature reports an increasing number of courses and degrees delivered entirely through CMC [computer-mediated communications]" (54). The benefits of CMC noted by Schrum include "place and time independence, many-to-many communication, collaborative learning, and dependence on text-based communications to promote thoughtful and reflective commentary...synchronous and asynchronous communication, access to and from geographically isolated communities and sharing of cultural diversity" (54). She also identifies three major challenges for the on-line instructor: "increased time for delivery..., creating an on-line community, and encouraging students to become independent learners" (54). If I understand her correctly, Schrum sees the electronic delivery of a course as something better than the old-fashioned correspondence course because a teacher can communicate with more students more rapidly on e-mail or through the net than is possible by means of traditional mail (56). Further, when Schrum remarks that on-line courses ought not simply take traditional courses and add them to the net, I think she is right (56). Educators need to decide whether the computer is just a big electronic book or a new tool. However, this is precisely where Schrum stops. She asserts that computer-based instruction is new, but offers little in the way of describing how specifically teachers are to use this new technology. The few suggestions she makes are fine, but come to little and too late in her chapter. They are worth repeating for they give us a sense of where we need to start:
1. Create a team of developers that includes a technical person, a subject matter expert, an instructional designer, and a student.
2. Allow time for this team to explore, experiment, and evaluate their activity.
3. Create a mini-course that learners can take to test hardware, learn software skills, experience on-line education, and determine if it is an effective learning environment for them.
4. Begin with a few courses and expand gradually. Continuously revise and improve courses, using failures as opportunities to learn. Reward early adopters for their willingness to take risks. (60)
However, there is something naive about this list. The suggestions work well for an experiment, but what instructor at what university will have a five-member team of experts at his disposal for, say, a freshman composition course or a survey of the fine arts? If, as the research suggests, on-line instruction takes more time to prepare and to manage, how are current faculty, especially those who already teach three courses a quarter or four a semester supposed to find time for "exploration, experiment, and evaluation" of their on-line courses?
At first glance Crawford Kilian's article "Why Teach Online" looks promising. He raises seven important and commonly voiced objections to on-line teaching. His list, which includes the following:
1) On-line teaching is not cheaper or easier than face-to-face teaching
2) It's not for everyone
3) It's not better than face-to-face teaching for "the computer monitor is an information desert" (31)
4) It's not the way of the future: the technology is still developing too rapidly. We don't know what will stay and what is just transitional experiment.
5) It's nor organized like face-to-face courses that are arranged linearly and with which most teacher and most students are comfortable
6) It's not a pure medium: why should teachers simply replace face-to-face teaching with on-line teaching?
7) It's not politically identical to face-to-face teaching: the teacher-student relationship is being replaced with an egalitarian mentor-apprentice relationship. (Kilian 31-32)
However, in spite of the interesting critique that Kilian initially offers, he changes course for the final third of his essay. He decides that it is important to teach on-line in order to reinfrnachise minorities and the poor; moreover, he claims that the technology will not always be expensive and that on-line teaching can permit the desirable one-on-one teacher-student interaction. In my view Kilian does not exactly set up strawman arguments, but he does give rather facile responses to the interesting and legitimate questions that he raises earlier in the essay. The first two-thirds of his essay is in bad faith. He also uses some slippery-slope arguments that, frankly, are insulting. Listen, for example, to his argument produced to condemn the classic teacher-student relationship:
If the classic student-teacher relationship is psychologically satisfying, so what? Slave-owners used to think they really benefitted their slaves. Who among us hasn't enjoyed a quiet, sadistic thrill at announcing what the class would have to do on the big term paper, or to prepare for a quiz? To see all those people acknowledging our power, our superiority...it's a buzz, all right. Like a bottle of good vodka, and ultimately just as dangerous. (34)
Finally, like many who have embraced the new technologies wholeheartedly, Kilian assumes that those who prefer or who continue to teach off-line do so from an unwillingness to learn new things. This is simply false.
If Kilian's essay seems rather unexpectedly to change course, Ronald D. Owston, in his essay "The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning" offers a more up-front and balanced overview of the new technology in education from kindergarten through university. Owston starts by re-examining questions originally posed in 1995 by Gordon Davies in his office as Commissioner for Higher Education in Virginia. Davies three questions are:
1) Does it [technology] make learning more accessible?
2) Does it promote improved learning?
3) does it accomplish the above while containing, if not reducing, the per unit costs of education? (27)
Owston goes on to provide responses in some detail to these questions. He unlike others I have read, at least acknowledges the debate that centers on access versus quality in on-line education. he also notes "at least three advantages" of web-based teaching which he identifies as follows:
1) The web appeals to students as a learning mode (29-30).
2) The web provides flexible learning (30-31).
3) The web enables new kinds of learning (31; tellingly, the shortest section -- TRW).
Owston's essay fairly assesses the questions. However, like others, Owston has simply asserted that the web enables new kinds of teaching and learning without demonstrating specifically and substantially how this is so.
Richard Lanham, in his book The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts offers the most intelligent, most broad-based, and most persuasive arguments that I have yet encountered on the technology and the arts discussion. His work is made all the more interesting and relevant by the fact that Lanham is a senior scholar in the humanities, a professor of classical rhetoric by trade, and one who believes that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters but to fulfill them" (xiii). Lanham presents a case in favor of using the new technologies to teach and to practice the arts. The arguments that he presents in the ten essays that comprise his book are carefully constructed, eloquent, even entertaining as might be expected from a rhetorician. In fact, the playfulness of Lanham's writing proves the good faith behind one of his main ideas, i.e., that rhetoric is by nature playful[2 and that electronic text, Lanham's name for the "electronic display" of the personal computer (3), is inherently rhetorical (31). Lanham moves from ]equating electronic text with rhetoric to juxtaposing rhetoric with philosophy arguing that the crux of the modern struggle in the humanities between those who resist the new technologies and those who embrace them lies in the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric:
Rhetoric persuades by taking for its engine our evolutionary heritage as primates -- our need for pure play and competitive hierarchy -- and slip-streaming behind them some act in the practical world. On this plate lies the main bone of contention over which the philosophers and the rhetoricians have been fighting all these 2,500 years. The philosophers believe that human motive is purpose driven, and play and game derivative functions; the rhetoricians -- forced to get results in the world of affairs -- have always inverted this pattern. (110)
Moreover, Lanham sees the revival of rhetoric by means of electronic text as "a curricular revolution, a new didacticism" and suggests the name "experimental humanism" for the renewed role of rhetoric in the reform of higher education (110). It is in this new rhetoric, this experimental humanism, that Lanham locates the general theory that might provide the core for the core curriculum which American educators have been trying to find for a century (112-114). Added to this is Lanham's vision of "integrating the arts into a single critical inquiry" (1) and here he touches very close to home for this is what my program at Ohio University, the School of Comparative Arts, has been professing since 1963, well before the advent of computer education in humanities education. Listen once again to Lanham:
In the digital light of these new technologies the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our very eyes, as do the administrative structures that enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between the creator and the critic that dissolves, but the walls between painting and music and sculpture, music, architecture and literature. Might not they all, like a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk find a common literary reality as drama, as Cage so long ago predicted? The very volatility of it all, the relentless dramaticality of such continual modeling, might bring it about. (13)
The potential democratizing power that Lanham sees in the new technology is what most clearly links his theory to that of the other educators whose work I have discussed. Lanham focuses on the centrality of the computer in current thinking about education in democracy. He writes, "The class struggle of our time can be seen as a struggle between literate and oral worlds, between...a controlling literacy and a disenfranchised orality" (71). For Lanham, the world of conventional printed text, the world of the philosophers, comprises this "controlling literacy" whereas the "disenfranchised orality" means not only the illiterate population, but also the population of rhetoricians or would-be rhetoricians who, by means of electronic text would be given a voice.
I have entitled my presentation "Theater and Philosophy, Information Technology and Democracy: A Skeptic's View," and I reckon it is time for me to speak about both my skepticism and the theater. Like Lanham, I am a humanist and also like Lanham I think the new technology can potentially offer good things to artists and humanities scholars. However, I am probably more skeptical than Lanham regarding the overall value of the new technology at least as its supporters now suggest that it can be used and I am not entirely convinced that the salvation of the humanities rests with the new technologies. I do not believe that the arts as traditionally practiced are bankrupt and I offer as evidence the theater. Theater is a synthesis of all the arts: music, painting, sculpture (if one counts the costumed actor as a sculpted figure), architecture, and poetry (in the broadest sense) are all components of the theater arts. When the play has been scripted, moreover, it exists as literature and reflects the thought of the author, dianoia, in Aristotle's Poetics. In the hands of a master like Euripides, Shakespeare, or Goethe for example, drama can be philosophical.[3 Moreover, dramatic literature is written to be communicated orally, so its rhetorical component is important.
If Lanham is correct in so much of what he argues, I believe that he has still ignored the potential inherent in an art like theater to bring together his two binary oppositions, namely the philosophical-text and the rhetorical-oral-electronic text. I am not advocating theater ]instead of electronic communication, but I do not understand why discussions of the arts, education, and technology so often end in either-or thinking. A caution that I will raise, however, is the tendency of those who advocate the new technologies to write humanity -- I mean here human beings -- out of the equation. The reason that the teacher-student relationship has lasted from fifth-century B.C. Athens to the present day is because humans enjoy and need direct person-to-person human contact. Furthermore, one reason why people still attend the theater nowadays when it is so easy not to is because the live actor on stage, moving through space whom we might even touch or smell if we are close enough, brings us closer to real human communication than even the best two-dimensional film or video. We certainly can enjoy film and video and there are many motion pictures that are of higher quality than many plays. However, the live theater gives us truly participatory art for, even the most silent, respectful, introverted audience participates in providing an atmosphere in which the actor must work. Without the actor, the audience is just a group of people seated in a room; without an audience, the actor is just a man speaking alone. The same might be said about democracy, for if democracy is really about the power of the people, these people, it seems to me, need to be more than virtually present; and while we can and ought to use the new technologies to provide access to information, we ought not let the democratic process happen solely or even mostly in cyberspace. We need to be present for one another; we need to be able to look our elected officials in the eye and they need to feel our presence.
What I am suggesting is that in the arts, in education, in technology we progressives need to consider limits. Albert Camus in his classic essay on rebellion L'homme revolté points out the folly of rebellion that fails to recognize limits and I think his thesis is applicable to our subject. If machines were designed to lessen the burden on humans is there not a point at which the machine threatens to replace the human? Maybe it is that boundary that we all, scientists, social scientists, and humanists, should be trying to define. The story of Dr. Faustus, the Reformation Age German, scholar and magician, whose endless striving for knowledge led to his damnation might be instructive. Ironically, we owe the existence of Faustus's story not originally to Marlowe's Elizabethan tragic drama, but to stories circulated by sixteenth-century Lutherans who wanted to check human pride and ambition and who circulated these stories by means of an early type of novel transmitted by the latest technology: the printing press! Upon reflection, maybe the example of Faustus is not so ironic as it is appropriate; and maybe we humans, who are wrestling with the application of techne to traditionally imperfect, imprecise human activities, art, education, and democracy, can only hope to continue to find the just balance between the extremes of short-sighted ignorance and vain ambition.
Bentley, Eric. The Playwright as Thinker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946, rev., 1987.
Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. 1956. New York: Vintage. 1984
Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." In Basic Writings. Trans. William Lovitt. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper. 1977.
Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Kilian, Crawford. "Why Teach Online." Educom Review. July/August, 199-.: 31-34.
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1993.
Laurel, Brenda. "On Finger-Flying & Other Faulty Notions." In Cyberarts: Exploring Art & Technology. Ed. Linda Jacobson. San Francisco: Miller Freeman. 1992.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Owston, Ronald D. "The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?" Educational Researcher (March 1997): 27-42.
Said, Edward W. "Humanism?" MLA Newsletter. 31(Fall 1999)3: 3-4.
Schiller, Friedrich. "The Stage As Moral Institution." Trans. anonymous. In Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1974.
Sclove, Richard E. Democracy and Technology. New York and London: The Guilford Press. 1995.
Schrum, Lynne. "On-Line Teaching: A study of Emerging Pedagogy." In Adult Learning and the Internet.
NOTES
1. For much of my preliminary research I am indebted to colleagues at Ohio University: first, Dr. Ann Kovalchick, director of the university's Center for Innovative Technology for Learning (the CITL) who presented an overview of current research on the topic at the university's Colloquium on Teaching in spring 1999, and second, to Dr. Dean McWilliams, professor of English and a Ping Institute Professor of Humanities, who called to my attention the book The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard A. Lanham.
2. See page 40, for example, on this aspect of rhetoric and playfulness.
3. For in-depth study of the philosophical elements of western drama and the idea of the philosopher-playwright, two essential studies remain Eric Bentley's The Playwright as Thinker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946, rev. 1987) and Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).