The New York Sophist

Reflecting on attending the National Conference in New Orleans

I wrote a long post about this earlier today but for some reason Substack didn’t save it. I know there was some trouble with images earlier as well so maybe the whole server was having trouble. Either way, I’ll write a different one as I am not sure my laptop up in the office has this saved either. I’m hoping it is, and if so I’ll post that one too. But here are some reflections from the National Communication Convention that was in New Orleans just before Thanksgiving.

For those of you unfamiliar, the National Communication Association is the professional organization for all those who study, teach, research, and practice the broad term “communication.” I’ve been going for years, and before this convention I felt a little odd about going. I thought maybe my time with NCA was coming to an end. Perhaps there were other or better things to do – or maybe just different; time for a change. Regardless, my feelings about going were lukewarm at best. Now that I’m back home, I’m feeling pretty good about going. Here are some reasons.

1. Being a Teacher

The NCA convention should be seen by those who teach and mentor as publication, review, and continued engagement in the work of pedagogy. We should see the convention as a site of “publication” – read in that traditional sense – where one can see one’s work in mentoring and teaching happening around them and with the former students one interacts with.

I’m thinking about this as a solution to something that bugged me that I wrote about a while ago. My old friend Tuna Snider who was a long-time debate coach, often dismissed the NCA convention as something “other than” work. I argued in this paper, presented on a panel remembering him after his death, that we should see his coda – his dedication to hosting global debating workshops anywhere in the world that would be receptive to him – as his “body of work.” He wasn’t much of a writer or publisher in the traditional sense, but the living collection of people who worked together on debating and attended these workshops could be seen that way.

After returning from New Orleans, I think that NCA can be a place like that for me where I can check up on the circulation of ideas and people, unperturbed by Socrates’s concern that an idea can wander away from you unable to explain itself. In this realm of publication, ideas and people are alive together and more ideas and more people join in on the questions and the work.

2. Begone Debate!

Many a person has accused me of “hating debate,” if anything I pay too much attention to it according to some people. I wonder what else there is to attend to? I feel like debate taught me well, very accidentally, but I had a very unique experience in my interactions with the intercollegiate competitive debate world. My lack of deep involvement as an undergraduate might explain why my ideas are seen as odd by those who were deeply invested and continue to be so as administrators and coaches in programs. Regardless, I find working on something that is pedagogical and educational, with its untapped potential of slicing across the university faster and better than a vice provost can say “interdisciplinary” to not be a waste of time, but something that invigorates my classroom teaching.

I do not think I will ever return to intercollegiate debate. Of course that comes with the large caveat that one’s relationship with debate is never “over,” per se.

I always try to attend a few debate panels, but this year these were incredibly stale. They spoke about debate across the curriculum as if it were a new, vibrant, idea. Trouble is, it’s still just an idea – as it was in 1999. They still talk about public debates as some malformation of “debate proper” and wonder why nobody comes to their events. One could argue people are not engaged by such 19th century forms of engagement anymore but I would gesture toward TED talks, Intelligence Squared, and YouTube – with a massive amount of videos in the hundreds of hours of debates between people on myriad subjects.

I thought many times of Kenneth Burke’s theory of correctives, and wondered if I was working on the poetic corrective to a religious/scientific paradigm that contemporary intercollegiate debate is stuck in. Burke’s imagery of the religious corrective as a large lumbering hippopotamus sitting in the water nearby seems apropos of where intercollegiate debate is. I think I’m done with trying to engage with it on that level, and might not attend these panels in the conferences to come. It’s a wonder I didn’t realize this when during the pandemic debate coaches used powerful technological tools like YouTube, Discord, and the like to merely replicate weekend tournaments. There’s no interest in innovation there.

I am interested in innovation using debate formats in other forums at the university, away from the hippo of the tournament. It’s time for a major corrective, but these weighted words are not going to get wings from going to another panel about how to save a debate team from a budget cut. I can also talk about better models of debate, something that nobody seems interested in because the parasitic infection of the tournament has almost completely compromised the host, debate. They cannot or will not imagine debate without tournaments. I can!

3. Plan Your Own Convention

I was positively floored at the impact, fun, and joy I had at the Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca panel I put together, particularly because it was scheduled at 8AM on a Saturday. It went better than my wildest hopes!

At first I thought the division hated the idea because of the scheduling but no – I think they put it at that time because they knew it would draw a crowd, and it did! The diversity of points of view in the audience was really something else. I pulled out my Mikme recorder and turned it on, and this is a full recording of the panel.

I think the energy of the panel comes through on the audio recording. There are some brilliant ideas here and the panelists are so well versed in the book that there’s little to compare this session to out there. I hope you like it.

What I learned from this is that I should just design things I would want to see and attend. Put people on the panels I think could contribute greatly to the conversation, and let’s see what happens.

Just like I mentor people whose work I want to read one day, I now think I should just create events I want to attend and see how they go. I think I’ll be very surprised!

There are more reflections to come, but that’s good for tonight. Nursing myself away from a cold that I immediately got once home and the energy of New Orleans faded. But much more to say – and more to say about New Orleans!

Now that I’ve written a bit about the ideal model of debate that should be taught and practiced, I thought I might criticize contemporary debate teaching and practice from the same perspective, that of the Lacanian discourses. Contemporary debate practices are the university discourse, or what Lacan would later call the discourse of fake science.

The model here has the subject present itself as knowledge (S2) and address the other as its desire (a). This could be thought of in a number of ways, most commonly presented by debate teams and so-called “debate coaches” as “You really need to know how to argue properly.” Another variation: “Debate is an intellectual activity.” A further one: “Debate is for intelligent and smart students.” There are of course a ton of ways to say it, but the general gist here is that debate is a system of knowledge that wants you to be a part of it. It can also be seen as creating a desire in the other for it, as it presents itself as a pure form of knowing.

This is related to a lot of fantasies about what it means to know and be intelligent such as: responding quickly to questions, being witty immediately after someone says something wrong, never looking up any information, so-called ‘thinking on your feet,’ and other such strange models of “being smart” that exist. Not all of these are bad, but it’s bad to think these are the signs of intelligence, not practices that situationally may or may not be what you want to invoke for a particular kind of engagement from your audience or interlocutor.

At a recent debate conference a friend told me that they “loved” teaching a particular format of debate. What a strange thing to say – except for it’s dead on for the university discourse. Format appears to be the mode by which the self-regulating set of knowledge of debate is distributed. If I am teaching rules for a format, I am teaching the knowledge of debate. There’s no ideology or judgement here; this is just how debating works. Any format presents itself exactly this way, hiding very well that there is a choice being made about who to serve. The ideology (S1) is concealed by the presentation of the extremely attractive knowledge about how to argue and win against anyone – a pure system of engagement that has no stake in the outcome would be the best way to show everyone that you are right and smart (not necessarily in that order).

The result of participation in the appearance of self-ordering rules for debate that promise the result of always producing a winner in any engagement is a subject wracked with uncertainty outside of this clear rule set. It could be said that instead of thinking of debate (S2) as concealing an ideology that does not follow the rules of debate; a master order, a politics, a deeper feeling of the true (S1), what debate really does is cover over that strict rules of human speech and discourse, aka reason or logic are really political moves and investments in the messiness of human communication, and that’s what is being hidden from the debate practitioner.

Of course they will never figure this out – it’s in the position of inaccessibility. They will always have a sort of cynical and uncertain view of public argument, wondering why people cannot “follow science,” or “accept the facts” as our contemporary discourse puts it. Worse yet, one is hesitant about expressing one’s views on things without a clear rule set, or agreement that a particular set of argumentative rules will be followed as they “should be” in debating. Debate represents an ideal of perfect self-organizing knowledge about what arguments are better than other arguments.

What is a bad argument? Debate can tell you, but it cannot convince you. Why is that? It is because the value of good or bad in argumentation is determined ideologically. This is not permitted to be discussed in current tournament debating pedagogy as it ruins the game. Adaptation to audience is not what debate is about. It is adaptation to an audience that believes with monastic devotion in the pure project of reason, that is, argument without human failings. Arguments should be good and accepted no matter who says them, when they say them, or how they say them.

The result of all this debate team, debate coaching, and tournament pedagogy is the production of people who understand what makes an argument good, but are unable to confidently enter the fray if the situation is not rule-based. They are uncertain, or “split” subjects, people who understand how the world should be and live in a different world. The narrative of justification of piecemeal action is the great benefit – they can justify the system of reasons to anyone, which is very different from persuading people to change their belief. Recognition is not feeling; there is intellectual adherence, then there is passion.

This is a similar problem we face in argumentation pedagogy in general with the fallacies where they can be recognized, yet have no purchase on rejecting arguments that “feel right.” People can pass a fallacy quiz with an A+, and then leave class to go happily vote for a fascist who offers nothing but ad hominems and post hocs, seasoned with begged questions. The reason? Because they are right. Ideology is behind any organization of argumentation and to teach it this way, keeping that in the position of inaccessibility only fuels job security for debate coaches – “look around, we need logical debate now more than ever!”

The solution is of course in my previous post, but there are two other discourses to consider from Seminar 23. I’ll post about those as potential solutions for debate pedagogy in the weeks to come.

I cannot answer this question, but I can provide the conditions by which a debate model could be judged in relation to this question. In short, I know what I want the students to be able to do after participating in a debate program. In my own program efforts, I think I have accomplished this somewhat, but more work would need to be done to get it exactly where I would want it. The method is, if you aren’t getting students to be able to hit certain benchmarks outside of debate practice itself you are not teaching anything but the test, and you should adjust what you are doing with your students to get them where you imagine they should be after debate experiences.

In educational theory the idea of revolutionary transformation is thrown around quite a bit as the ideal outcome of education. There should be a significant change in thinking, ability, skill, or action in the student to indicate that true learning has happened. Often in educational terminology this is called “mastery.”

In my department we regularly have meetings about our objectives, which are peppered with the term – students will develop, display, indicate, communicate “mastery” of particular educational objectives we set out for them. We often look to the production of knowledge (S2 if you remember from previous posts) to indicate mastery. But wouldn’t mastery be the presentation of the sign of mastery?

Mastery for Lacan is quite different, it is the ability to arrange knowledge “on your own terms.” That is, you present the sign around which the knowable, the worth-knowing, and the valuable are arranged. You take control of your life and the meaning of the things you do, say, and practice in it.

Such a goal would be the desired outcome of a debate curriculum or a debate program of my design. I have thought about this quite a bit, and I’m still quite unsure what debate curriculum would approach the discourse of the analyst.

I’m not saying that good debate is therapy or even therapeutic. The association is one more with the terms of the discourse than the actual practice. Debate should allow one the capacity to arrange and rearrange knowledge around the sign of mastery. But as you can see from the diagram, this is harder than it appears – knowledge is forbidden in this arrangement. It’s hidden under the appearance of desire. So what should debate produce? What sort of mastery is this?

I would say this is the rhetorical model of persuasion, the ability to indicate what is right, good, true, evident, without access to an extant knowledge per se. This places debate in the realm of the epideictic – the rhetoric that considers the just, the valuable, and the praiseworthy. It might seem odd to separate debate from reason, but that is something that is also praiseworthy – reason is in the realm of the epidictic itself as a practice and a term worth praise. The epidictic is also the source of argumentative claims according to The New Rhetoric. This is where we go to figure out why we care about what we care about.

Good debate instruction provides mastery, provides one with the sign of the master. This can be read in many ways. But before we get to that result, the presence of the speaker must be looked at in detail first.

What is being represented on the left hand side? Typically this is the position of the speaker, the agent, the one who addresses. Underneath is what is hidden or made inaccessible through the stance taken by the subject. On the right hand side, that fraction indicates the other, the audience, the one who is addressed or indicated in the discourse. The bottom figure is the result of the interaction. The result here is “mastery.” How do we get there?

The explanation of how this idealistic model of debate works is through positing itself as desire (a) – this is something you want to be. This basic rhetorical gesture indicates that there’s knowledge here (S2), but you never get access to it. It remains in the position of inaccessibility underneath the presentation of desire. Students, or potential debate students, are in the position of the other – asking endless questions about their desire in hopes of getting some knowledge ($). It is this intense questioning process that leads to mastery (S1). “I can explain to you what it means to know,” rather than “here’s what you are supposed to know.” This is the distinction, in this case, between S1 and S2.

So many debate instructors take a subservient view of debate much like the traditional subservient view of rhetoric – it is about presenting information and knowledge gleaned through means located elsewhere. Debate will help students conform to the world and understand what is true or false; they will become part of the knowledge that exists already – a set of knowledge that is stable, timeless, objective, and understandable if you commit to it. This model, which I will write about in another post, is the bad model of debate that keeps getting taught and for which we have no good convincing alternative.

The power of debate, structured as endless inquiry against a never-ending desire produces something we could call confidence, humility, inquiry, intellectual curiosity, discipline, creativity – the list is endless as what can be called “mastery” here. But it is clear that this is not organizing oneself to fit someone else’s notion of what we should value. This model of debate empowers those who take it on to take ownership of the world and confidently argue to others what is worth knowing, on their own terms, not under the thumb of others.

A model here would not have any absolute or universal characteristics. But let me throw some ideas out there that I like that might come up for serious consideration in discussions about modeling debate competitions (aka “format” conversations).

First, this idea of the judge. I like policy (NDT/CEDA) debate’s early 2000s trend of calling the judge the “critic.” Much like removing the phrase “debate coach” from our utterances, removing “judge” removes a particular sense of what the observer of the debate (as opposed to audience; audience is anathema in policy debate) thinks and feels about the performances involved. In short, the critic helps the debaters see if they were able to own their argumentation, a very important perspective that the critic can only provide. This isn’t acceptance, but some sort of friction against the discourse of the students. I remember in 2002 a student telling me “How dare you indict my poetry” when I said it really didn’t help me identify or vibe with the point she was trying to make. This is an interesting take on the critic, someone who can’t say very much at all but just praises the attempt at art. The poetry was bad, but by what standard? And how can we use that to gain mastery of our speech?

Secondly, what counts as evidence? Immediately upon writing that question, I’m struck with the sense that this is repetitive. But evidence should not have any firm external foundation in such a model; the evidence should be defended convincingly by the participants in the face of the questioning of it; the sorting of information into categories such as evidence, information, and noise seems like essential practice for mastery. I know what sorts information and discourse and I can speak about it and present it in ways that, even if you are not in the same position as I am, you can definitely see and even take on such a sorting as relevant and necessary in this case.

Finally I think a word on delivery – there is a norm to debate delivery that betrays lack of mastery and intense insecurity about one’s words. Where are the variations in delivery? Where are the variations in style, as in word choice and vocabulary mustered to speak about various issues? The delivery of a debater is unmistakable – clipped, quick, and shrill, intense without exigence, no gaps and no silences. It’s amazing how that delivery has become the norm for debate formats globally. A format with mastery would have guidance on how to develop delivery that works for the moment and works for the way one would like to present one’s case. It should not be a prefab. Mastery would involve choices in how to say and how to deliver one’s position. Here we have “debate delivery” on full display all marked with indicators of belonging to one particular sphere of discourse – and not the one that produces mastery. Here we have the signs of conformity to mastery that emanates from somewhere else, but certainly not from the speakers. They are marking their discourse with the signs of the familiar (as opposed to the signs of being right, true, understandable, caring, etc). Discourse of mastery would have a delivery that crafts that mastery situationally, not conforms to what it is supposed to sound like.

Those thoughts are quite loose and premature, but the base theory is not. If we want the discourse of debate to produce mastery, this mode of discourse will do so. We have to figure out how to make the first utterance one that is desirable and imminently questionable – a firm reversal from how most so-called “debate coaches” present debating to new students.

Or We Need Actual Peer Review, not this Monstrosity

In Jacques Ranciere’s incredible book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, he argues that the time of the Old Master is behind us. Instead, true education comes from equally exposed minds on a subject in agreement on mutual respect for the working of the mind. Through this matrix of mutual respect for minds able to figure out the world and offer reasonable and thoughtful answers, any subject can be learned. What strikes me about this model is the total lack of a bank or reservoir of information that must be conveyed across dangerous, difficult, or sometimes impassible terrain to get to the student. Although this is a powerful way to think about teaching, I’d like to start with Ranciere’s characterization of the Old Master as the problem with peer review. I am leaving out of this critique any peer review that is focused on experimental or methodological review – I think that has important reasons to exist. What I want to focus on is how throttling and destructive peer review is for things like writing about theory, doing criticism, or other sorts of scholarship based on interpreting not data but other texts. As Hans Georg-Gadamer asks, “Why must we always be clamoring after the social sciences to bulk up our research?” Peer review is a failed model, and it needs to be addressed in order to save the humanities and provide good and compelling reasons for the research university to exist.

What Peer Review Really Is

In the process of peer review, editors seek out an expert, or “the” expert on the thing that the essay is about. This expert will evaluate the manuscript to see if it conforms to the highest levels of scholarship in that niche area of the field that the person is writing about. However, this is decidedly not “peer” review. It’s “expert” review, coming from a completely different philosophy. The expert will decide if the manuscript “passes the test,” “conforms to the rules,” etc. in accordance to what this expert thinks the current state, rules, and scholarship is. This is an exam.

Furthermore, this is not a “review” of any kind but a challenge. There are numerous social media groups in the humanities that poke fun at “Reviewer Number 2,” an archetypical figure that is simply negative and not satisfied that the essay is as good as it would have been if they had written it themselves. Reviewer Number Two’s demands are extreme, ridiculous, and often pointing to their own insecurities about the field, offering a list of necessary citations that have to be included that is often longer than the piece itself.

This points to what is really happening – it’s not a review, but a challenge. It is an invitation to an antagonistic argument. The person chosen to review is not there to help the paper become better, but to point out its faults and flaws. The attitude of the standard peer review process is oriented around the question of expert quality. If there are gaps, flaws, or places where the argument is bad in the view of the so-called ‘reviewer,’ the paper should not be published.

As a moment of challenge, the reviewer becomes oppositional in a way to challenge the author(s) to make something stronger in their opinion, without any justification as to why the review is the correct, or right argument against it. Often reviews are written with a lot of questions in them in a spirit of trying to collaborate with the author(s), but this always gets read by editors and authors as questions that must be answered in order to get the paper published. The reviewer takes on the role or the attitude of being the most difficult, hostile, and thorough audience you could imagine. This sort of audience is one that would be identified by Chaim Perelman & Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca as a “vanguard” audience; one that stands in for ‘real’ audiences by being smarter, better, and more invested than any actual audience would be.

An actual Peer Review System

Opposed to this would be actual peer review, where someone at the same level as the author(s), not an expert but interested; not a master of the subject matter but someone familiar with it, examines it to see if it is something that they think other people would benefit from reading. This benefit would not be based on the manuscript meeting a “stable-state” metric, but something controversial. Instead of meeting extant metrics, the peer notices that the conversation opens up, becomes more foggy, more messy, and more of an invitation to engage rather than an attempt to shut down. Actual peer review (as opposed to ‘Peer Review’ in the received view of it) opens up conversation rather than trying to shut it down. It makes you want to engage with the work rather than be the defining moment of that field and that work.

Instead of an adversarial challenge from an expert, the peer reviewer takes on the role of an interested collaborator, reading the paper as an invitation to join in on the argument. Instead of being a hostile audience who is the most rigorously demanding sort of opponent you could muster (a vanguard guarding the gates), the attitude would be one of someone who is a potential collaborator, a fellow organizer, someone who identifies some common ground and wants to help you build something meaningful.

What I would want out of a peer review process could be summed up in the attitude of the co-conspirator. There’s a loose plan, it has a good aim, and I have figured out some of, or even most of, what needs to be done. In a spirit of trust I show the plan to someone who I think has similar political views as me; they are at least at the same parties I go to. Through that sharing, I get a shift in attitude: The person I approach identifies with my plan and wants to help construct it in various ways. They offer things that help it come to be. At some point they are not a critic, but still are offering criticism in the way a partner would.

This attitude can be invoked by communicating (!) to reviewers the attitude they should invoke as a reader of a submitted text. Instead of the current attitude – “this has flaws; as the expert I must point out the flaws; where there are no detectable flaws I must make the strongest argument imaginable that I could make against this paper,” etc. – an alternative statement could be offered. “Would this be something you’d like to co-author? Would this invoke more submissions to the journal? Would this circulate in conversation in a seminar/faculty group/among you and your friends?” I think what I’m going for is that peer review would accept pieces on their ability to stimulate generative text rather than the status quo, which is only accepting papers that are so airtight that one cannot find any air with which to utter anything about. That kind of stale perfection is death; we want to end conversations with our current attitudes about peer review.

Another missing element here is: Would this essay spark necessary question and conversation for graduate seminar pedagogy? I think graduate pedagogy is a vast, depressing wasteland for most. Maybe that’s my own experience talking, but imagine attending a mountain-climbing course where all you are presented with is video of people doing what looks like the impossible. There’s no discussion of their failures, their previous attempts, or even how they got access to the equipment and practice sessions that helped them discover how to summit a massive, hostile peak. None of that – just the images of success. Then the instructors say, “Ok this is what you are to do.” A lot of graduate instructors also are dishonest, and don’t talk about the luck and situational moments that allowed them to get a piece into a good spot to set everyone’s mind on fire. These pieces are the exception not the rule. What if we offered imperfect pieces simply because they would stoke responses? What if peers really did review the pieces, stirring the experts to respond? Articulation is a necessary force for argument: If we never have to re-articulate our positions when facing new contexts, new conversation, new proposals, we run the risk of our ideas becoming stale or worse – dicta.

One way around the problems created by the Old Master of peer review is to find another model – maybe Ralph Ellison’s “little man behind the stove” is instructive. The peer reviewer can keep out a weather eye for the authors in the terms of the question “are you treating the audience ethically, or are you speaking down to them?” An expert would never ask such a question; their loyalty, even in rhetoric surprisingly, would be to the purity of the thoughts, the theories, the ideas. Are these being appropriately cited and used? The little man asks the question “for whom?” on the end of that. And the reception of those ideas does not come through the predictable channels, as Ellison expertly argues in that essay of the same name.

There are a number of other areas to look for models for a review that brings up instead of shuts down pieces that are generative. It’s difficult to find a journal worth reading these days because in academic journals there are no conversations. The standards for peer review are Expert Opponent standards. There are no peers to be found and no review. There’s only a battlefield. Instead, let’s think about how to write an invitation rather than an indictment. The attitude should be one of welcoming in rather than keeping out. Conversation cannot exist where there’s no air. The cold lack of atmosphere in our journals shows this as a direct result of very solid, very good vanguard activity at the gate.

Actual peer review should draw upon the professions teacher side as well and establish a rubric rather than a gauntlet. If questions are proposed by journal editors for reviewers to answer that are specific and have different descriptions in rankings (just like a content analysis coding rubric, sorry Gadamer!) we might just be able to leverage the expertise of our field in more than just a hyperbolic, antagonistic way. We might be able to access the agonistic, the contest which, ironically, requires a lot of cooperation for the sport to be good. The contest is: Can I see this essay as having a hand in producing more valuable discourse about this topic? What could I suggest to add in order to ensure that this catches fire? These questions are in the spirit not the specificity of what would be needed but if you think that our journals are more important than our teaching (and most speech communication profs would find that a no-brainer) then where’s the peer review rubric?

A Call for Conversation

Let’s develop the attitude that the pages of the journal are community space, and we all benefit from having good and thoughtful engaging work there even if it is imperfect. In speech communication rhetoric (NCA focused mostly), it seems we are either building monuments or expensive condos, and not everyone can build on the extremely valuable real-estate of our ‘flagship’ journals. We want something that is sexy, lasts, and looks expensive. I think the aim is for a gated community, if there’s any aim at a community whatsoever. Where’s the public space? Where’s the place that someone can wander in and examine what we make?

The Old Master is alive and well in the world of humanities journal peer review. Instead perhaps we can all take a lesson from Ralph Ellison, and simply serve as the warning that the “little man behind the stove” is out there. We can help one another, as Ellison did, in addressing, as co-authors those who would not want our art in their communal spaces. We don’t have to take on the role of opposition, we can use opposition as a creative force to help one another say something in a way that encourages others to speak and write.

Vibrant conversation about importance that is interesting and accessible – and has a lot of interesting angles – is a great way to defend what it is the university does outside of “barely provide functional job skills at too high a price.” This rhetoric of the university and higher ed as a failing place is something we can directly address through the way we perform scholarship: An engaging argument that is valuable to have and performs that value in myriad ways. Waiting for an article to reach the standards of some Old Master’s view of perfection is not going to help. Who does that help? What does that system benefit? Vibrancy and recency, although not totalizing values, never appear. An actual peer review standard gets more flowing and produces more, calling attention to how experts disagree for audiences. It’s what the university should be about – a place of active and interesting inquiry, living and breathing, not a city of stone monuments that reference one another.

This September is finally starting to feel like fall and I’m experiencing quite a bit of nostalgia for my old debating life. The smell in the air and the quality of the light on campus make me anxious that have not booked a bus or hotel yet; that I made plans on a Saturday to do something in the city, and so on.

Habits are strange things that we often think of as bad, of breaking them before they break us. But there are habits of thought and feeling that are triggered by conditions that have little to do with our cognitive state or our intellect.

For example, I thought today how strange it would be to work on this campus and never interact with a student. How odd would it be to work at a college or university and not interact with students. Not out of choice, but because your job does not require any student interaction or meeting at all. Perhaps your job is one where you are not supposed to interact with students?

I have thought about leaving my university job more than many times. To do what, I am not sure. I really think the barrier is the incapacity I have to imagine doing anything in September other than standing before nervous students talking about the importance of speech. I would feel so lost and so confused by a September that lacked those things.

My immediate reaction to this thought is self-accusation: Why do you lack the capacity of imagination here? But perhaps that’s not the end point of where that question leads. Perhaps the self-accusation is realization that being in this position in discourse with students about, well, discourse, is not a lack of capacity but the root of capacity in imagination. Perhaps the classroom is my commonplace book.

“Several years ago you had my sister,” said the new student – but in a college classroom not a high school one. This is a commonplace for most secondary teachers: the announcement of legacy status. But in university this is unheard of. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but it took me (a)back. “How is your sister doing?” A full report was filed and I wondered and resented the lack of change in my position in this dusty classroom hearing about all the change in the years that have passed between her and me and now.

I assign textbooks in September; I regret textbooks in September. Maybe the ultimate capacity of the self-accusation of lack is to embrace it fully and just go. There is plenty to talk about; what’s on your mind? What’s on their minds? If rhetoric is a thing as powerful as you write about, think about, and imagine it to be, then what are you scared of? What holds you back from just going in? Why all the accoutrement? Why the bumpers, why the railings, why the handholds?

The real trouble is thinking of an incapacity as the root of all capacity. That’s a tough order. Imagining an incapacity as inventive is really a stretch. But it isn’t really – what else is the point of a commonplace book in rhetoric other than to recognize – and admire – your incapacity to “say it just like that.” Collecting bits of information, quotes, and statements – images from others – is a good habit that seems as if it is there to remind us of what we cannot do. But the contemporary mode of the commonplace book – the “vision board” of the younger generation – is an inventional device that is created to help you imagine and work toward creating something that is within your capacity. The old commonplace book should be seen this way as well I think.

But habits are hard to break. I am grateful for that, particularly in September when the light has this certain motivating quality even though I really don’t have anything to prepare for it. The feeling of anxiety, then relief is good but nostalgic.