Anger is like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.
Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for your enemy to die.
~ Attributed to Buddha
It’s a busy time of year at the university. I had let a nice, not-so-important email languish for six days in my inbox due to being distracted by writing deadlines, class preparation here at the end-times, and other odds and ends.
Now that class was over at 5PM on Monday it was time to address this email. Someone is being nice; someone is looking out for me and doing a favor. I can’t believe it’s been six days.
I open the web browser and hit the wrong tab, and fall through a time vortex. Since I was testing my new linux build on an old desktop, I’m using the web email interface – all emails on the system are present. I land in 2011.
Looking around, I can’t believe these emails. All are from an ancient and foreign time where people are contacting me about debate tournaments, trips and partners confirmed and denied, and all sorts of questions and plans are being made. It is bustling. And familiar. And foreign as can be.
After clicking through these for a bit the tone of all administrative emails – actually most of these tournament-related emails is one of demand. Why are you doing this? What have you done? You haven’t done this. Why did you do this? The underwhelming support from administrators was everywhere; the overwhelming tone of mistake and error was everywhere.
It really made me angry. I sat there for a few minutes once again angry at the whole situation. I’d sacrificed my own time and money for years for a whole bunch of stupid people.
I could so clearly see the evidence in all these emails that the colonization of the tournament had completely corrupted debate as a rhetorical practice. It simply did not exist. I was willing myself to see it there even though it had been eaten up long ago. There was no debating going on only the tournament.
Over the past couple of days, the vibrations of that anger have come back to me, as I’ve been in a few conversations where people I wish I wouldn’t have to think about ever again were randomly brought up to me. All those awful tournament people. What a waste of time. These are the people who relish the tournament; it gives them meaning and defines who they are as people. They have nothing else. They only have value through the equivocation that the tournament and debate and being intelligent are all the same thing.
The anger is really directed at myself and the realization that confirmation bias gets all of us, in the end, in the beginning, and all throughout. I spun all the red flags and bad vibes into challenges that had to be put up with in order to do the sort of teaching I wanted to do. What a fool I was. I wasted so much of my time going to events, spending a ton of money, and encountering people who were not interested in much other than the inflation of their egos.
Like the blooming of plants anger comes around from time to time but we don’t think of it as a blooming at all. We don’t experience it as anything more than something like allergies, a force like a sneeze that takes over and has to come out. But in Buddhism it’s said that it should be treated more like a blossoming, something to experience and check out.
It wasn’t a pleasant experience but did get me thinking about rhetoric a bit. First, the difficulty of reaching anyone with this message from the world of debate. They will only read this as sour grapes. Most of my criticisms and suggestions about transforming debate were read at the time by debate people as things I was suggesting simply because they would help my team win more. They thought this because they could imagine no other motive for wanting to change the operation of debate contests.
Secondly it strikes me how incredibly difficult it is to write about waste in a way that makes the audience feel the waste. This too should be obvious given the climate crisis. The difficulty of persuading anyone that waste is destructive and damaging is beyond challenging. The existence of the fallacy of waste – known as the sunk cost fallacy – shows how difficult it is for people to accept waste. They will reason themselves into generating more waste in order to not let waste “go to waste.”
Anger blooms and blossoms. It’s suddenly there after the absence, like spring. Here it is. What happened to the time; where did this come from?
These lessons are good meditations. They hardly compensate for 10 years of misplaced time and energy. I am the only person on my campus who thinks about tournaments from time to time. Good. I’m always thinking about theorizing debating. Good too.
I told the email program to take all emails from 2009-2019 and delete them. It did it. I responded to the 6 day late email and went home.
What do these liberal dicta mean? Immediately for most people they mean “anti-Trump” in some form or fashion. They might also mean “not a conservative.” These phrases are polarized and perhaps worse than useless – harmful without their nutrients, like Wonder Bread rhetoric – stripped of the fiber of their being in order to gain attention at a lower price point.
These phrases are fantastic if made a bit more complex than “I’m intelligent and you are not, O sad conservative!” If we look at what we are meant to trust and believe, we get a shocking insight: Scientists are not results-driven, at least in the way we imagine – they are not after the truth per se, but after everything related or assumed to be in there with the truth.
Scientists love failure and success in experimentation and research because it all adds up to . . . well something. Something is better than nothing and definitely better than assuming or guessing. Science’s truth is not the outcome that works, it’s the process that produces all outcomes.
This is all, to quote President Obama, above my pay grade. I’m a humanities professor but I can’t help but think about “trust the science” in relation to the big threat of the hour, ChatGPT. My colleagues across the country in the humanities and any subject that uses writing as a form of assessment or grading bemoan ChatGPT as a criminal. It’s a grifter, it takes and takes and never pays anyone back; it’s a home invader, knocking at the door for help then keeping you prisoner in your own space while it robs you; It’s the unscrupulous politician, sounding great and deep but never able to act on anything it utters. It just utters and utters and can’t seem to understand that it’s bloviation has unintended meanings all over.
Kenneth Burke reminds us that humans are “nervously loquacious.” I feel ChatGPT is a very good reflection of that. It isn’t looking at data but human discourse, siphoning it and churning it and re-presenting it (and representing our collective utterance quite well I might add). AI isn’t anything other than a skimming off the bottom, middle, top, and the sides of human discourse – like this post – that is hovering as a magnetic field in some disk in some server miles from where you and I are.
The solution to ChatGPT’s criminality is to remove what it profits from. Students believe that writing a paper is a result-oriented task: That is, their whole lives as students they have been assessed on the final paper. They are deeply worried about getting it wrong. It also doesn’t help that most professors grade grammar, syntax, punctuation, and even word-choice, arguing that a particular vocabulary is necessary for a “college paper.” These same people turn around and decry the colonial and classist university curriculum, oddly enough.
Approaching students as I have with “I really just want your opinion on these readings” isn’t good enough to stop them from associating with the criminal ChatGPT. It offers a perfect product, so long as you double check the sources it cites and also make sure to take out the self-depreciations (“As a language model AI, I am not able to . . .”). I have been using ChatGPT quite a bit to see how it would put together phrases about theories, relate them to one another, and what examples it would use for an argument theory from sport, something I am notoriously bad at knowing anything about. These moments help me with my process, with what rhetoricians call invention and arrangement, and sometimes style. They are not a substitute for what I write and what you read, but they help out a lot – like a kitchenaid or a bread machine, two things my mother couldn’t praise enough when she attained them. They didn’t do the work for her; they assisted her immensely in the work she enjoyed, and allowed her a “discount” to try new, complex things to bake.
Humanities professors freaking out about ChatGPT only need to return to the nutrient-full phrasing of trust the science. Perhaps we can tell our students to trust the method – the putting together of the ideas about the readings or the class need not be perfect, and a failure of an essay (origin French, from “to attempt” by the way) is a possible A. One has only to communicate, to try to get across the thoughts and feelings they have about a complex text. That’s a challenge enough. Making it more a process of engagement rather than an evaluation of what comes out will put ChatGPT in its place, a resource for invention that sometimes helps you figure out what you want to say about something, or give you examples your audience could connect with.
ChatGPT means to give up assessing and grading the final essay, and becoming much more interested in process. This is the gift of ChatGPT, it allows us an immediate reason to change our too comfortable and often questionable pedagogy. Why is writing a final essay in isolation for a professor to read and evaluate the best way to understand understanding? Does it even make a top 10 hermeneutic list? Breaking that assignment up into various reaction and reconsideration parts help students see that essays are, like their French origin, tries. If we emphasize that not just in our kind words to nervous students in office hours, but in our rubrics, we will find the threat of ChatGPT to be no more devastating than a student talking to others about their writing ideas.
Focusing on the final essay as the thing instead of believing in the process regardless of the outcome is the reason ChatGPT causes us so much trouble. Change the focus, change the meaning. We’d like our students to be as loquacious as the rest of us, and, understand we are all scribbling away nervously at the edge of an abyss.
The end of the spring semester is always a difficult time for me where I spiral into a slug-like state of sitting around until 4pm for a couple of days wondering what I’m supposed to be doing. More realistically: I fret about what I should do first. I have a long list of things that, between September and May, I write down and grumble to myself that if I didn’t have to teach on this particular schedule I would have so much time to accomplish all these things. Well here we are in the earliest of early days of summer 2023, and I feel a bit out of focus (not the world, me).
Often this time of year is one that calls for people to call for reflection, which is a “bending back” or sending back of the light by formal definition. Refraction though seems more interesting where light is deflected, broken, and courses are changed. I wonder if rhetorically one can move into the other? As we reflect we suggest refraction? Perhaps the rhetorical move is to shine the light back, see what it shows us, then redirect the light going forward. It seems that in speeches many people keep this sort of attitude, particularly this time of year when we are awash in commencement speeches.
Let me reflect on the semester’s teaching then suggest how to refract that information to change what appears.
Moving Speeches out of the Classroom in Public Speaking
Reflection
This was something I thought would free up class time for conversation about things rather than about modalities. The trouble with teaching public speaking is that all the resources focus on modalities – types of occasion speeches rather than issues. My theory was that if I assigned particular books it would not only spark some good classroom discussion but good speech topics as well.
The topics the students chose had little or nothing to do with the readings. The class discussion used the readings to launch into tangents from the readings that connected deeply and well with the supposed subject, rhetoric (public speaking as I see it). But there was little depth to the reading conversation and no connection at all to the speeches, which we did through software called GoReact.
Refraction
Specific speech assignments – maybe 2 to 3 minute total reactions as opposed to larger 6 to 7 minute assignments – might be a good way of connecting the readings more to rhetoric. Asking particular questions about rhetorical concepts in the books would be good.
Keeping the speeches outside of the class is great. Going to continue it for a while, but I need to figure out who the audience is and what the style is for these speeches recorded on webcam. I might have to encourage them to do a few different kinds: Sitting at a desk, walk and talk, sitting outside, public place, etc.
There is also the question of accessibility. I have confronted this before in terms of offering some non-spoken assignments for equity purposes like quizzes or short writing assignments. The more I think about it, accessibility is vital but this might not be the way to go for it. I still need to think forward about how to do this, maybe weekly oral assignments is the way?
No Textbook only Books
Reflection
I seethe with jealousy when I look at compositionists’ courses, full of interesting books about vital and fascinating topics. I thought the tradeoff was rough: 60 plus essays to grade pretty frequently can cut into your weekends. I wondered if the best of both was possible: Could it be that I could assign a thematic set of readings and teach public speaking based off of that?
I tried in earnest now that I found GoReact. Earlier this wouldn’t have been possible since in the classroom it can take 4 to 5 class days to ensure everyone delivers their speeches. This is time wasted, as the classroom doesn’t really provide anything but anxiety and avoidance behavior from the students. Doing it as videos online seems like a better way to teach how to present more efficiently.
I assigned four books this term: Joe Sach’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with Plato’s Gorgias in one volume, David Bohm’s book On Dialogue, American Dialogue by Joseph Ellis, and finally On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason.
I chose these because they represented ideas and topics I thought students would engage with automatically: Climate Change, U.S. centered rights discourse, and the role of dialogue versus overt persuasion. It seemed good and we had some nice discussions about the readings, but the course wasn’t readings focused as it should have been.
The students seemed to like the reading and did ask questions about it, the conversations went all over the place however and I wish it had been a bit more focused.
Refraction
Organizing the readings around key themes would be the way forward. I think I’ll keep Gorgias and Rhetoric as a good contrast to Bohm’s focus on dialogue as a sort of anti-rhetoric discourse. This could be a good way to open up the term since on everyone’s mind is the question “Why do I have to take this course and pay for it?”
Posting textual or audio responses in Discord or the LMS (we use Canvas, but Blackboard, Moodle, Google Classroom are all the same thing in my view) would be a two-birds maneuver – non-speech oriented assessment and feedback would be great to add.
One of the things we all shy away from these days is lecturing – it’s a villain! It’s not a great defense considering his politics and viewpoints, but Woodrow Willson had some amazing thoughts about lecturing in his writings about Adam Smith. I have re-sold those volumes or I’d quote it here. Needless to say these are not the people you want defending lecturing. However, given the podcast and YouTube future of public address, maybe lecturing can be re-imagined here as something that is done outside the class, and the classroom space is the forum or place of conversation about it. This is something to experiment with for sure. And time intensive for the instructor.
The other books I’m not sure of yet. Maybe something about rights and the Supreme Court? Students seem to be interested in claiming their rights all the time, so maybe we can send things that way.
Assignments and Artificial Intelligence
Reflection
A much bigger post to come here on this topic but I took the attitude of designing assignments and student work that pushed hard on the idea that I want their personal opinions. This is the solution to AI generated assignments in my view.
What I got was some very interesting writing that wasn’t very good by University writing standards, but great in the realm of sparking my imagination, giving me pause, and helping me rethink some of the ways I teach.
This course was called Foundations of Rhetorical Theory, or for those of you who are from the life, Classical Rhetoric. I had some great writing responses that resonated with me and it was a relief to not read the formulaic “correct college paper” essay that Jasper Neel savagely dragged years ago and Dan Melzer revived in a creative way not too long ago.
Thinking about the role of assignments in the land of AI had me think about fighting the huge wave of pedagogical history the students have about writing: It has to be professional, good, well cited, and correct. The anxiety is such that most students sit down to write a paper the night before and try to hammer it out without looking back at it – there’s too much that could be wrong with it, so better to just hope and type on! It is a challenge to fight against how they have seen writing papers over time, and on face they really don’t believe me when I say I want their opinions. But it worked out ok for those who gave it a go!
The paper assignment can seem like nature is upside down to them, what they thought they were approaching to climb transforms and threatens to drown them. Not preparing at all seems reasonable in a situation where the geography can alter without warning.
Refraction
Sharing a philosophy of writing or paper composition might be the way to go in the future. I remember once sharing my half-page, bullet pointed assignment guide for a paper that was incredibly general with a colleague who gave me a 17 page paper assignment guide that was mostly the basic rules of grammar. No wonder students turn to AI tools for some relief and manageability when they are assigned a scary paper. More repetition and more reinforcement of what I’d like to see through some shorter assignments might be good.
Students also write continuously, all the time via text messages and social media. Incorporation of images in writing might make the form more comfortable and push them toward a way to plan out for the kind of writing we’d prefer. Learning a language is best done in relation to the language you know already. And that’s what we are trying to do isn’t it? Not evaluate their attempts at something new as if they’ve been doing it a while? I’m very guilty of this too; a few years ago I gave some comments on some papers that I wish I hadn’t. Redesigning the assignment was more prudent to get the sort of insight that I want for them and for me. AI’s quick spread – like a spill across a table – has been great motivation to really work on what this could look like.
Communicating disappointment with a correctly written college essay might be the move too: “I like the grammar and the citations here but this feels empty; where are you in all this?” This might be the best way to get a re-write if someone has aptly used an AI tool to write. The detectors are no good; and the professors are worse than any cheating could be. Suggesting using AI as a co-pilot is good, but then they have to add themselves into the mix. I might try to write an assignment guide like this for my fall courses. If I do, I’ll post it.
Reflection and Refraction done! Now summer can begin in earnest, right? I won’t spend my mornings messing around with nonsense and start writing and reading at 3PM, right? right??
When our department was first formed here back in 2008, the first order of business of the newly assembled faculty was to choose a department name. After the great I.A. Richards, I suggested “The Department of Miscommunication.” Richards had suggested in his work that nobody really studies communication. When it works, he argued, it’s uninteresting. Nobody pays attention to communication when everything is going great. It is when people misunderstand and judge in weird ways that we wonder how it happened. Often times I think this is the root of rage and anger when people don’t “get the obvious.” So I thought it was a good name for us to go with. I was quickly ignored after people realized I wasn’t joking.
Now on my campus nursing is all the rage. Aside from the obvious irony of building a giant nursing facility on a university campus (home care for the aged? Is this symbolic hospice?) everyone is thinking of ways, or trying to think of ways, to wedge what they do into the new program and new flashy facilities and budget. This only makes sense. And apparently my subconcious is as well. The other day I saw something that referenced the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and misread it to say “Department of Unsuitable Sciences.” I thought, what a cool and appropriate place for a rhetoric professor! For isn’t rhetoric an unsuitable science?
Arguments from Lacan and Lundberg’s great case for thinking of rhetoric as a science, it’s really not a suitable one is it? For rhetoric eschews commitments of all kinds. Scientists will interrupt here and proclaim, “O how wrong you are about science! For a scientist is the first to throw off commitments in the light of new information!” However that is merely trading a set of commitments for another. What the rhetorician does is point out that this is wordplay. One calls a serious commitment “truth” or “data” as a scientist, and something removed from that a “commitment.” The rhetorician is always moving the goalposts and the field, sometimes in opposite directions to explore what happens if we have a goalpost and no field, and vice versa.
The Department of Unsuitable Sciences would preserve this sort of fluidity of moving around the ‘givens.’ Yes, we are practicing science; yes these sciences are unsuitable, perhaps as sciences but we open up the research into a number of different ways to determine unsuitability. We simultaneously hold up the idea that these are sciences and that they are unsuitable as such or for other reasons to be discovered through our work, which only takes place by way of propping this title up. Without it, there’s not a lot of reason to inquire after it, is there?
Unsuitability moves under its own force. Sometimes we feel the sharpness of it when we tell a joke and nobody takes it as funny, or when we make a comment that in one venue would have gotten a laugh, but in this one only creates furrows on frowning faces. This alone is worth study, and thankfully some rhetoricians define the art of rhetoric as one of the study of appropriateness. What is appropriate in one venue is not in another; we have a sense about this, but it’s hard to articulate and makes us very uncomfortable when there is the demand to articulate the reasons why something cannot be said in a particular location in space-time, around particular people.
Perhaps the Gen Z term would be “Department of Cringe Studies.” I think that this might be what we are after in serious rhetoric – the avoidance and appearance of the Cringe. For that is a serious, embodied reaction, hard to articulate that is often brought about by the appearance of combinations of words. Symbols misunderstood and misused are at the heart of cringe as well. The Department of Unsuitable Sciences is open to any and all research into cringe content.
Perhaps the Department of Unsuitable Sciences is a good podcast title? I have been thinking about a new solo venture in this medium, so why not? If it’s unsuitable for podcasting then it would be a perfect fit.
This time of year reminds me how far removed I am from tournament debating. My social media feeds are filled with horrifyingly saccharine posts about how success was found even though teams didn’t win “the big rounds” (shocking!), all credit is due to individual hard work, heart, dedication, or a number of other values that perhaps self-styled leftist debate “coaches” shouldn’t trade in. In the end nothing is said about precisely what was learned, or how to measure it, or even what insights were garnered about argumentation, rhetoric, discourse, evidence, or the like. All it comes down to is a few platitudes that wouldn’t differ that much from the writing of a little league or high school football coach.
My experiences in debate went on way too long, but this spring I’m a bit grateful about my debating experience, and trying to plumb it for insight into how to run a debate course – very different than the coaching world where winning isn’t interrogated but losing sure is, and there are no measures of the success and learning we all know is happening but cannot articulate.
I feel like I am always of two-to-three-minds about debate – that there’s something powerfully educationally radical there but the domination of debate activities by 1) formal educational institutions and 2) people who see no problem organizing debates around the same principles you’d find in child’s baseball or soccer games ruins or deflects interpretations of debate at its full ability. Abilities outside the tournament structure cannot be imagined easily due to the colonization of thought about debate by pro-tournament instructors. Most debate coaches are teaching debate tournament practice, not debating.
Add to this the obsession of scholars (such as myself and my colleagues) who mistakenly think that theorizing argumentation will, by default, theorize debating. These terms are used somewhat interchangeably by the public; isn’t that an indicator that scholars should look a bit deeper? An argument is not a debate. Can it be? Under what conditions? What’s the relationship between these terms? This is woefully undertheorized. What’s the most recent scholarly book on debating? Would that be 1964’s Decision by Debate?
Policy debate is a strange format among strange formats out there in the world. It’s primarily practiced in the United States and Japan. Both countries have different approaches to it. I’ve been noticing this as I transfer my videotaped recordings (!!) from when I was in Japan in 2009 to something digital to post on YouTube for the upcoming celebration of the debate exchange between these countries this November.
I’ve also been notified that my debate course has been selected as part of the Social Justice courses being offered as a part of the diversity initiative of my university. Years ago I insisted that we offer an argumentation course and a debate course. Most universities (and most debate people) see no problem with offering a course called “Argumentation & Debate.” I liken it to offering a course called “Zoology and Botany” since they are both pretty much about living things. We also wouldn’t offer a course called “Short Stories and Essays” – unless we were really doing a theory course and not a composition course.
All of this has me thinking about a question: Is policy debate a natural fit for questions of social justice? Does policy debate lean left as per the form of the debate, the rules and the discursive norms that are reinforced by those competition rules? I’m thinking about teaching this format as a way to investigate the question of social justice in various policy and legal contexts.
My initial answer is that policy debate imagines debate as dissolution. That is, debate breaks everything down from mixtures and alloys into components and then attempts to show how the flaws in the composition – from language choice to bias in research to the by-products of completion, etc mean that the approach to a question is a bad one. Policy debate treats argumentation as a chemical agent of breakdown into component parts. It could also be seen as the winner of a policy debate is whoever presents the most universal solvent, conjuring images of Thales (everything is water, judge) as well as some deep lore in the language of debate (solvenTcy?). The judge tastes the brew, or observes the process of dissolving of texts and rates the debate based on the quality of the substances chosen and the method of how they were dissolved; how many solids were left?
Dissolution when done poorly or improperly has less of the forensics lab, trying to catch the criminal and more of the Vegas magic show, where the white tiger appears in the cage after a flashy display of a purple, shiny cape. Often when we teach debate to young people or beginners we lean toward the Vegas show teaching – I can do this trick for you; now I can show you the awesome trick! As people reach the limits of potential participation in tournament debate they are more like a pre-Socratic, seeing everything dissolve into everything else and trying to account for it in some meaningful way.
This isn’t necessarily leftist. Methods like dialectical analysis (Marxist or not) are not about dissolution at all but about combinations that assume a relationship. You take two elements of society and place them together to explore the topos of similarity. Likewise, Burkean identification/division is more addition than subtraction. But then, does a debate method used to investigate social justice need to be leftist, inherently leftist?
I wonder what you think of all this. There are merits in the leaning of policy debate toward dissolution. Other debate formats might have another principle involved in them. A quick and broad-brush list might be to associate Lincoln-Douglas with contraries; World Schools with contrast; World Universities with combination; and American Parliamentary with contradiction. I need to think this out a bit more as this seems like a series of posts now not just one.
Is policy debate a good format for leftist analysis? Or is that an illusion brought about through competitive norms that reward dissolution? There’s nothing particularly politically engaging about dissolving discourse into another discourse to prove that it is ineffectual, although it’s challenging and fun. There’s certainly not a clear path to intervention past the tournament if you walk away thinking all things dissolve into water.
