The New York Sophist

What side of the bars am I on?

Many years ago when teaching public speaking at Syracuse university, a student gave a speech about her spring break in Amsterdam. Consuming mushrooms every day, they decided to go to the zoo where they promptly learned they were on exhibit for the animals. Unable to escape, they sat on a bench and wondered about their new life until the zoo staff told them to leave at closing time.

A memorable speech but not for the correct reasons. Needless to say, it left a mark on me as a master metaphor: What side of the bars am I on? Supercharged by Freudian thought, I always am aware that anything I’m viewing is looking back whether I want it to or not (or even if I’m aware).

I’m writing today as I have been doing most every day of January recess, trying to get some things in the hopper for publication, and I realized (again) that it’s pretty useless to fight against my writing process. I am full of (paralyzed by) shoulds and ought to’s and other such dicta to the point where i just stare for long periods of time at a screen and click around in Reddit or various Discord servers.

Here’s my major should: I should want to sit at my desk and use my very nice PC with 24 inch monitor to write, in silence. I should be able to do this in the evenings before bed.

What my process really is: I have to use this very particular Chromebook model, at my dining table, with books around it all opened to a particular page, but placed page-side down on the table in a semicircle around the laptop. I need pretty loud classical piano music as well. And I need to make sure I don’t eat anything all morning (starting as early as possible) until I am pretty certain that I have tapped out where I want to be on the page – or to a place where the backspace key is being tapped more than the letter keys.

This reality also involves a lot of coffee and water, and occasional visits to the internet to see what other books about my topic I could buy and have sent to me. I’ve been lucky in the sense that if I dedicate my morning to writing, the after-lunch to evening shift can be about reading and notetaking. I’m not a very good afternoon writer, but I can sew a lot of productive seeds – or create prep for the writing kitchen for the next day’s cooking quite well.

Am I a prisoner of these habits? Most assuredly yes, but only because of perception. At some point I am asked to leave the zoo, and I can get up and walk out of the exit. However, to fight that perception is to miss a lot of time where I could be taking in the animals, the exhibits, the day, the words, the thoughts, the other things we need in order to write. I can just resign myself to being stuck, and consequently be on the right side of the bars of the writing habits most every time.

Same Obsessed Me

This is perhaps the most influential book on my thinking, which I picked up as an undergraduate from the Texas A&M bookstore. That copy is not this copy. That copy is full of highlighter, pencil marks, and several colors of pen. I let a student borrow it for the winter break. This one is one I found for sale at the Syracuse University library, when they had a shelf of books for 1 or 2 dollars right near the main entryway. I wonder if that shelf is still there.

The New Rhetoric is dismissed out of hand by contemporary rhetoricians mostly because it feels old. It’s slow. It has a lot of antiquated examples. It’s not really something that we are used to reading in my field. Most of the time, attention is on the latest political speech or Netflix special – and definitely not on a book that maps out a better way to think about arguing in the social spheres of life.

I wonder though if the book could be redone. Or reupholstered. Or needs a new frame. Not sure what the metaphor is here – the book does from time to time feel like it needs a flush and fill.

Although the aspects of life where we argue are well chosen: Politics, Philosophy, and Literature, there’s a real difficulty in getting the points they want you to get simply because we are not up on what’s circulating among French-speakers in terms of books in the 1950s. Part of me feels the examples are drawn about 50-50 from what’s being read now and what any good French culture school student would have been exposed to in high school or if they had attended university for a bit.

This doesn’t help us with the book – the examples are a bit too far out there. So I’ve always wondered if it could be re-written with some contemporary examples. I’ve also wondered if it could use a new translation. I don’t read French so I’m not sure how good the translation is (or how necessary a new one would be).

Or someone could write the New New Rhetoric, and just update all the things that Chaim and Lucie are saying. There’s a lot in the book that has remained untouched by most American rhetoric scholars and would be more investigated if it was made a bit more accessible.

So here are my ideas with the book:

An Example Companion Guide: This would read like David Harvey’s great books on reading Capital, something you could take a look at to help you understand what’s being said in contemporary terms in each section of the book.

A more modern English rendering: Take the translation we have now and update it to contemporary American usage of English. This book is written with the French “reading public” in mind and the translation seems a bit musty at times. Might be better to reword the English and note that it’s not really a high-fidelity translation.

A graphic novel: This is mostly just an excuse for me to buy manga-making software  or Visual Novel maker or something ridiculous. But it might not be a bad idea to try to create something graphic about this book to highlight some of the most important parts of their theory. It’s being done with very oversimplistic and harmful renderings of fallacies and evidence and things like that, so maybe this would be a good counter? Definitely outside of my wheelhouse and comfort zone, but isn’t that what audience adaptation is?

A “How to Debate” Guide: Aimed at undergraduates, a book about how to construct and deploy arguments without getting frustrated or upset would be a good contribution across the university. This might be the easiest of the projects here.

I’m slowly drafting a lecture series for YouTube about The New Rhetoric so hopefully I can start filming that in the new year. As for now I’ll keep reading and taking notes.

Stare at me while I talk on Discord please

I’m liking making this vlog, and I hope you like watching it. Let me know if you want me to cover anything in particular. I’m just sort of going down my list of annoyances and interests related to pedagogy, rhetoric, and life at the university. I’m open to anything you think might be interesting to hear about.

In this episode I talk to people on discord about the idea of student-created rubrics for various purposes.

Pretty Excited about the New Stuff Coming Soon

Animal Crossing came out at the perfect time – right in the middle of the lockdown. Being able to totally control an island down to the ground level or below gave us all the feeling of control that we really needed in a time when there was little control around. 

I played hundreds of hours of this game in the pandemic, spending most of my mornings fishing, chopping wood, collecting fruit, and delivering various insects to the Owl that runs the museum. Everything had a place, a category, a value. The animal neighbors were eccentric, but peaceful. They made demands in a dream logic form, easy to accept and dismiss since they would not be detached from the animals. Once in a while you could deliver something for one of them or get them a fish, and they would be happy for a brief second. For the neighbors, time was an eternal present of desire – whatever was on their mind, they’d say it, and that would be it. 

There’s a big update for the game coming in a few days and I’m more than excited although with my schedule I am not sure I’ll be able to play it. I’ve been getting on Animal Crossing from time to time, when I can, in order to sort of “get ready” for all the changes coming – farming, cooking, new neighbors, a coffeehouse, and most importantly the Gyroids – strange musical clay pots with faces that I believe are the ancient gods of the Animal Crossing universe (this is a minority opinion). 

Years ago, my dad encountered animal crossing when my youngest sister was playing it on the Game Cube and remarked that the game was overwhelmingly and surprisingly capitalist. This is not unique to Animal Crossing; most games have some sort of mechanism for making money and then making more, but Animal Crossing does have a bank, public projects, and many vendors. I would say that instead of being capitalist alone – that is valorizing the accumulation of the means of exchange as a game object – Animal Crossing is a fantasy representation of colonization, where there is no downside whatsoever except for regret.

Let’s deal with the downside first. Regret – I have heard this expressed from my friends who overdeveloped their islands to the point where they are unrecognizable as such, where there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Every part of the island is perfectly curated in the modality of a shopping mall – the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside. Every part of the island is a room, making the house a palace where the value is the representation of non-indoor spaces, or rooms that could not take place at all. 

The upsides are many – you can be altruistic and create bridges and other structures, you can plant trees or cut them down, you can grow whatever fruits you like (assuming you can find other fruits than your native ones), and you can either sell or donate the animals you catch. After donating one to the museum, the scientific community is satisfied, and you may do what you will with other specimens. You can also collect fine art and donate that to the museum, but some of it could be fake – so you should do a little research before buying. 

The game is a model of progress and knowledge that is right at home pre-19th century, that of the collection, or the table. You collect various insects and fish and account for them by placing them in the museum. 

So what kind of game is Animal Crossing? I’m still thinking about this. Perhaps it’s its own genre of game. Is it even really a game? I guess there are conditions for play – rules and such. There are limits. But you are free to move around in those limits and do what you like. You are pushed toward pursuing the satisfaction of the neighbors, the museum, and your own desires to buy and display particular sets of furniture. Is this really capitalist? Or does it just naturalize forms of exchange and knowledge as part of the basis of setting out to develop a new community? Or perhaps, is it a fantasy of control – where all the decisions are yours and the stakes are low – so that we can stay somewhat together in the larger world of exchange, accumulation, and community. Perhaps there’s another level, where games teach us that the rules don’t have to be a certain way, and very much like some sort of Frankfurt School theory of resistance, we recognize what we don’t have when we step away from Animal Crossing and enter our daily lives, hungry for change. 

I teach an art, a field that for much of its history has been exclusively about orality and speech.

My entire time as a graduate student and professional, my value in the field has been determined through how I write very particular formal essays.

It seems odd to me, it always has, how there’s little to no interest in oral rhetoric as a way of sharing serious ideas. The closest we ever get is reading conference papers to one another in small groups in Midwestern hotel ballrooms.

I think that giving a presentation on video and uploading it to the internet has a lot of advantages over traditional academic publishing and should be something that is encouraged in the field. I think this might be the way to solve a lot of old issues with the field of speech-comm derived rhetoric and provide some nice new advantages for the interesting things we have to say and share about research.

Things it would create: A public appetite and interest for rhetorical theory as such (I mean, they already have this appetite; professional scholars choose to ignore it or worse, consider it too pedestrian to bother with) a conversation among a number of figures about ideas that the public can be involved in through comments and responses on the same level as the initial interventions, and the human behind the ideas would be present in all its expressive, emotive glory.

What about the peer reviewed research journal? I am afraid we’ve been performing CPR so long on it we don’t even notice it’s hardly a body. Kept alive by dark means bordering on necromancy, the peer-reviewed journal is not even meeting that basic requirement of being a journal – being read as such. It’s a filing cabinet.

Alternatively peer review standards for online video and audio content should be developed. There’s a market standard now, but that’s hardly fitting. What sort of peer review would be needed for a podcast? For a video? Are there things we can borrow from journalism or documentary filmmaking here to build something for us?

There’s a lot to be considered and it will be difficult to get buy in, but the possibilities of creating a sentiment for what we do, what we think about, and what we make among the general internet-using public is hard to buy. More exposure to what faculty think about and create will only increase interest and understanding, if it’s done well – that is to say, done appropriately for the audience you want to reach.