Resisting our usual ways of looking

Despite decades of exploration, tinkering, and, at universities, certainly, implementation at scale, we are experiencing shock as we are plunged, around the globe, into distance learning. 

I’ve been thinking, for many years, about the possibilities here in digital space, beyond the more obvious but obviously significant factors of convenience or accessibility, and outside of conversations about the machinery of distance education, which, necessarily, has taken up so much space for so long. Yet despite the ubiquity, now, of technology, we are so often stalled by it still. Perhaps it is because, as Heidegger argued, technology discloses everything as measurable, orderable and calculable, available at our command and our convenience, and here, where we are entirely encircled by technology, it is more difficult to see differently; our eyes see through the lens technology creates.

I have been trying to find a way to disentangle the technology from distance education to express what often seems inexpressible, its poetic possibility. I am currently reading Peter de Bolla’s beautiful book – Art Matters. He attempts to put in words what he calls the “mutism” of aesthetic experience – when we are moved profoundly by a work of art – by close examination of three pieces of art. He begins with Barnett Newmann’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, a massive painting which stands almost 8 feet tall by 18 feet wide.

The sheer size of Newman’s picture, he argues, poses the question of distance. How do I see it? Many, given this size and the absence of a human figure, see it as cold. Empty. Inhuman. De Bolla sees it differently: “The depicted human form is displaced from the picture plane, only to resurface on the other side, as it were, in the space in front of the canvas.” This displacement, he contends, makes the human more powerfully present. He argues against the common idea that the very size of the painting makes us feel small, insignificant. Instead, he says,

Vir Heroicus Sublimis demands that the viewer resist a particular form of looking…to enter a shared space in which the nakedness of presentation asks one to face up to being here, in the visibility of a communally constructed presence. Here in the hushed sublimity of a shared world.

And in distance education, in our vast shared digital spaces, with the teacher displaced behind the glass, what new possibilities might emerge if we resist our usual ways of looking?