[-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

[Patricia Zimmermann]

COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

Only the recent books on documentary history and analysis could be found as e-books, according to our librarians at Ithaca College.  The theoretical books in critical ethnography, critical historiography, theory were confined to hard copy.  Our librarians ordered every e-book on documentary they could find, squeezing out budget from small cracks so my students in my History and Theory of Documentary class could have some readings.  Plenty of books on new media theory had been published as ebooks, so that covered part of my class, but not the abstract part, the meta.

The college had shutdown. We had one week to "migrate" our courses to "remote instruction."  Words from administrators and not from faculty.  COVID meant shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be called.  F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens.  Migration from the embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. From three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.

The great migration as some have called it came with a great work speed up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating ideas about "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism and comfort displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous shift from the collective to the individual, from the abstract to feelings.  To be student centered, we should be synchronous, stay in touch with our students, send emails, be available on Zoom open office hours, understand. These ideologies ignored what faculty had to do:  redesign and restructure and reconceptualize courses in a new interface, a new format, under almost impossible conditions. And all of us, whether at elite schools, public universities, or third rate four year private colleges had to do it fast.

Presto, I thought.  Very fast.  Tumultuous.  A forward driving rhythm with contrapuntal tension.  Presto.

I scrambled to cut films and new media projects out of my syllabus, not to make the course easier, but to respect the labor of our librarian who digitized titles for Sakai. He was swamped by requests from across campus. He was digitizing ten hours plus a day to get it all done.

When the Governor instituted PAUSE which shut down everything, this librarian brought in back packs and shopping bags to pack up all the DVD titles faculty needed, and many external drives.  He would digitize from home.  I cut and pruned and honed, trimming down titles.  I convinced myself that instead of my carefully curated sequencing of films and new media to use juxtapositions to jolt students into ideas through shock or through pleasure, I needed a new plan.  The curatorial plan would not work online.

 So I brainwashed myself into thinking this could now be a "slow read,"  a deep dive into close readings of the texts.  In fact, Tim Murray, our comrade here on Empyre, even offered an argument that all undergraduates need to learn to read films and new media carefully on a formal level of textual analysis, so this was in fact, not defeat, but a good thing, a cleansing in a way, a paring down to what matters.

I started to play Mozart's Sonata in A Minor during this scramble to transition my courses to online.  Written in 1778, it commemorated his mother's death, a mix of pounding repetitive chords and flying lines of fast notes, then a gorgeous sweeet andante movement, and the third movement, presto.  Tumultous, surging dynamics.  Juxtapositions of loud and soft, rage and sweetness.  The sonata sits as only one of two Mozart sonata in a minor key. I realized this so-called mass migration to remote learning catapulted me and other colleagues into presto.  Not the kind identified with magic shows, but presto, fast, furious, contrapuntal.

But, as we say in critical historiographic theory,  there is the straight story and then there is the crooked story.  The straight story seemed to emanate from administrators emphasizing access to media technologies, teaching synchronously, simply transposing what we do in classrooms in a large media school to an online environment.  It meant an uncritical technofetishism of workshops, tutorials, webinars on various gadgets and interfaces that disguised the anxieties, work speed ups, and conceptual work.

All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though the Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and transform our images into postage stamps.

The straight story meant asserting without critique that students needed high end gear to make their films and videos, and that it needed to get to them at all costs.  The engineers called me, worried about how to decontaminate cameras with all their nooks and crannies.  They called various equipment places in New York where friends of theirs worked.

Noone knew how to decontaminate lighting gear, sound recording equipment, cameras.  They worried if they went in to the building to get gear to ship to students for their thesis projects, they would die. Or their children would die. Or they would be sick for weeks. They worried if they did not do this, pretend everything was the same, the straight story, they would be fired.

Their crooked stories unsettled me.  And as crooked stories do their work, their  bends, and forks and branches push us to see differently, that the straight story of official histories is a lie that camouflages terror of change. Historians like me look for turning points, shifts, where movements and layers recalibrate, reform, in the crooked stories where the tempo is not andante, but presto, where contrapuntal voices complicate the melodic line.

A younger colleague called me. She was crying.  It was impossible to do all this synchronous teaching with a 2 year old and a partner who also worked at home.  Newly tenured, she wanted to know who I thought would be fired.  The college continues to worry about enrollment, a small school without a big endowment that depends on tuition.  Workforce reductions were mentioned at every webinar of what is called the Senior Leadership Team....I did not even know SLT referred to them.  She said it was impossible to even think. She could not write. She could barely read. Now she had to figure out how to manage cooking dinner, shopping with worries of infection, caregiving, finding a place to be quiet to do her Zoom meetings with students, grading, answering more and more emails from students who could not meet any deadlines.

I joined forces with some other senior faculty advocating for extensions to tenure clocks, the adoption of P/F, the abandonment of student statements. We were not alone. It was a grassroots, national movement.

Another woman colleague wrote me a long email. She said she could not think as her fear infused her brain and her heart. Anxiety consumed her like a mudslide.  She had a 1 year old, no day care, a geologist husband who worked in another state, pressures to be available to students and be synchronous, doing all the shopping, all the cooking, all the cleaning, tracking down students who never showed up or wrote back.  Then, she said, the college keeps messaging it is having financial problems, it needs to resize itself.  She asked me this:  will I be fired?  She had heard that most of the part time and one year contract faculty were not being renewed, and that class sizes would be increased. She said, "I feel terrorized, the speed of all of this, of just a day, leaves me depleted."  I told her we needed to do a Zoom at her convenience, just so she would not feel alone. In that Zoom, she told me that she did not feel anyone understood her research (she is a massively productive feminist social scientist in communications), that she did not feel anyone at all in her department supported her, and that the great migration meant a great migration into an anti-feminist work speed up. The isolation offered no community.  My heart broke for her.

Another colleague wondered if the program he directed would be cut given the budget crisis and the perils of a drop in the first year class in the fall.  He shared that noone spoke to him directly, and that he has morphed into a Kremlinologist, watching the administrators webinars for clues, but finding they only propagated more anxiety.  Workforce reductions. No international travel.  No raises.  Larger class sizes.  Work speed up. Presto.

If my emails were transcribed into musical notes in a score, they would reveal the last movement of a sonata, presto, with different voices layered in counterpoint. The student who shared he could not turn in his paper on time as his father, an emergency room doctor, contracted COVID in a Philly hospital. A young woman who told me she could never manage any theory courses, this was the fourth one, she preferred hands on, doing things, not reading or writing.  She said shelter in place robbed her of making videos, and therefore, she could not do my theory course because it did not matter.

Another student wrote and said going online offered something he did not have before:  discussion postings where he could think about the media projects before the discussion, and get feedback. Another said moving online and sheltering in place offered solace and respite. With no parties, no socializing, no clubs, no internships, no extracurriculars, no love life, she had time to focus on her readings.

Then, messages from colleagues, forwarding articles about the collapse of higher education, the great migration perhaps now meaning the great crash, where maybe only elite well endowed universities remain, and where places like I teach at reconfigure into something unrecognizable before they evaporate completely.

The excitement, the fast paced presto, of the Rapid Response Salons on COVID featuring colleagues opening up ideas that we produce weekly, a space that renews us with community and purpose. Some deans and VPS jump on the team and get involved, eager to swim in the presto of ideas not yet solidified. A retired much admired colleague wrote after participating in one of the Friday salons. She said "ideas will get us through this."

The third movement of the Sonata in A Minor pulses with tumultuous cascading motifs in presto in many voices.

When I play it, I think of my own mother's death, maybe from COVID, of the death of higher education as we all once knew it or perhaps, more accurately, fantasized about it, of the death of calm and solace, the death of being with others.

We are all in mourning for losses we can not yet name.

We are all in presto, speedy notes tumbling out in all keys,some of which we do not yet recognize and can not yet play with any texture, nuance, dynamics, or ease.  Presto.

Patty Zimmermann



Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor of Screen Studies
Roy H. Park School of Communication
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Ithaca College
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, New York 14850 USA

http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff

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