Hugo Ball, Franz Kafka, the University and The Singularity

"The war was based on a crass error.

Men have been mistaken for machines." -- Hugo Ball

The Dada artist’s quote is a precise diagnosis of the disease of the university department where I finished working yesterday. Metrics, surveys, rubrics, a swirling sandstorm of virtual tasks: these constitute the demented approach of many universities to everything from Spanish to History.  Students despise this environment of non-connectivity and resent the fact that they are paying a great deal of money for a teacher who is merely allowed to function as the administrator of an unending proliferation of impersonal tasks.

Indeed, I have quit my job as an adjunct professor of Spanish at a state university. The year is 2015. I sit in my home office with the windows open and a mild May breeze blowing through the screens.  Birds chirp -- at times with a consistent tone across their phrase, suggesting a declaration; at times with an uptone at the end of the phrase, suggesting a question. I ask myself: What is my psychic state after two years in such an absurd environment?  The words, “Kafka, Kafka, Kafka” chime in the chambers of my skull. The two-syllable surname, perfect in its assemblage of vowel and consonant sounds, rings like a strange bell.  Well, of course.  Invoking the eerie imaginary of Franz Kafka has become a cliché.  But it is for a reason: the slight man winding through the Gothic arches of Prague as the 20^th century dawned was writing tales which predicted our present malaise. Remarkably, they envisioned the psychological landscape of the job I just quit: a grim and inane and always-promising-but-never-fulfilling zone of despair that unspools dizzying spirals of frustration.

Kafka also divined what the much talked about Singularity actually feels like.  You know The Singularity – that shining future just over the line of the event horizon wherein humans merge completely with their technology to create a brave new being:  a post-human who soars as a gleaming falcon made of pixels and unseen digital pulses over what is left of the Earth landscape.  However, as Koyanisquaatsi writer and director Godfrey Reggio pointed it out recently an interview, if The Singularity involves the merging of human and machine, then obviously we are already there.   So much of our thought and action is now outsourced to the machine.  So much of our communication is now mediated by the machine. Certainly, the students at the university I have left and its Spanish Department are waist-deep in the great merging.  

For the students’ part, their willingness to detach from their devices and engage in conversation seemed to diminish with each passing semester -- creating an extra level of challenge for a foreign language instructor. And in a decision that defies the most elementary common sense, the Spanish Department  -- and, it must be said, the university as a whole, which is staunchly pursuing digital/hybrid pedagogy -- opted to reinforce student device dependency by funneling a great amount of work onto the web. It deposited the incessant self-evaluation forms, mediocre instructional videos, and a whole range of exercises into difficult to locate online archives. Franz Kafka described how endless waiting, endless strings of tasks which bear little fruit and, most sinister, endless distance manifests between people embedded in toxic bureaucracies. And all these symptoms emerge when the teacher-student relationship is outsourced to the realm of clicks and scrolls.

As if to intentionally increase the already present alienation, the Spanish Department where I taught enforced an absurd pedagogy currently in vogue, called the “flipped classroom.”  The idea is that, with their textbooks and through online activities, students are to pre-study all the grammar and vocabulary to be covered in the upcoming class.  Students arrive to class with the material well rehearsed and then can simply participate in challenging communicative activities managed by the professor.  Theoretically.  In practice, asking students who are taking a language as a requirement to assimilate sophisticated grammatical structures and new vocabulary alone, at home, and before class works very, very poorly.

In my 15 years as a language instructor, I have found the traditional approach -- wherein the professor presents and explains in an interactive manner the grammar and vocabulary, utilizing all along her personal connection with the students and presenting illustrative examples based upon what she knows of their interests –- to be tremendously effective.  And students do not resent this approach.  They even do not resent doing homework which reinforces the material taught in class.  In contrast, the resentment students feel toward having to teach themselves a second language and then arrive to class purely to engage in support activities is great.

But I have gone from the University, leaving the students and the department chairs and administrators to muddle through.  So, I return to the question that the chatty birds around my window had prompted in me: What is my psychic state?  As the days pass and the semester recedes into a dissolving digital mist, I still hear the word Kafka ring inside me -- but it is now interspersed with melodies by Django Rhinehart, a sense of my chest unclenching and the meditative silence I feel as I watch my partner paint a portrait of two pink dolphins gazing skyward.