To Each Their Own Catastrophe: On Online Education

For over a year, student life has no longer been a unique time full of opportunities, but a hopeless cycle of overwork and loneliness. Student Camilla Peeters looks at the drama of distance education with Virginia Woolf and Giorgio Agamben. 'The student feels like a mind without a body, floating in a spatio-temporal vacuum.'

Israeli Historian Yuval Noah Harari warned us in March 2020—early into the lockdown that came into being as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic—of the manifold dangers that accompany it. In a free-to-read article by the name ‘The world after coronavirus’ he assesses: 'Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life. That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours.' With ideas of keeping a mode of online teaching in place for the semesters to come floating around campus, this student’s perspective on the matter is critical of the catastrophe of distanced education.

The lockdown was evaluated in most part through economic terms. Harsh as it was for corporations and consumers alike, suddenly everything and everyone seemed to be reduced to just one of two groups. As was reported in all major newspapers, the first group consisting of mostly tax avoiders sought consequent tax bailouts—this can be translated into non-economic terms as not taking responsibility. The second group were first shut inside, then offered all kinds of lockdown-friendly products, then finally left to their own devices. The educational institution was easily fitted into the economic model: the universities and colleges took harsh measures, sent students home, offered them a corona-proof version of what was once teaching and proceeded to see students merely as machine-minds and the work those minds produce as profit. Any backlog in the curriculum became a failure of the machine.

'Students are seen as one or zero: a machine that ceaselessly produces content, or presses the stop button the moment it sees the chance.'

The biggest catastrophe for students these past months was the complete denial of their bodies. In Belgium, over 23.000 students signed a petition called #GeefOnsEenStem, which translates to 'Give Us A Voice'. In the petition, concerns were raised by students who felt like they were pressured to produce more and more work. They expressed the need to have their voices recognized as having real agency and demanded the institutions of education to be more mild during the upcoming period of finals. In the end, the government decided to implement a rule of mildness, though only for students retaking exams, out of a (manic) fear of students pressing the stop button. This signals that there is definitively more denied than voice, students are seen by their institutions—those places students put their trust in—as one or zero: a machine that ceaselessly produces content, or presses the stop button the moment it sees the chance, ceasing to produce anything.

So, the student must go on. 'The creature', Virginia Woolf writes in her fitting essay 'On Being Ill', 'cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant, it must go through the whole unending procession of changes… until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.' But the student in lockdown could not escape. The student, individualized in her room, works. The work seems never-ending. Teachers think that there is now more time to work, so they provide more work. There is no temporal divide between working time and leisure time, because there is no change in space. Everything is kept inside. And, since the work is never-ending, why not work ten or twelve hours every day? There is no spatial divide between working place and leisure place, everything happens at the same time. The weather does not change much here on the fourth floor.

'What was once a means to reach education, going outside now feels like a betrayal of education.'

The student feels like a mind without a body, floating in a spatio-temporal vacuum. Communication with other students is only embryonic. Their skin is weak, their muscles shrunken, because the student cannot afford to go outside. What was once a means to reach education, what was once an effort, going outside now feels like a betrayal of education, like running away from work that could have been done. The question is never what should be done, the expectations disappear into unfathomable numbers, the question is what could be done… and more. Woolf continues:

'But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilized the universe. They show it ignoring the body,… or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected.'

The student in lockdown who waged wars without a body, ends up ignored, kicked, forgotten. There are no funerals for the things we have lost. Still, there are requiems. Giorgio Agamben sings to his students at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici lamenting alongside them 'the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen', and eventually 'the end of being a student [studentato, studenthood] as a form of life.' If the embodiment of the student has become death, we, who are still so young, must teach ourselves new and tangible forms of life.