Odds and Rhetorical Ends

Can’t sleep due to my wonderful inability to breathe properly tonight, so here is a grab-back of relevant and interesting stuff:

No matter how much technology you have, circumvention usually comes down to rhetorical strategy.

And no matter what the law says, unpopular rhetoric is just as bad as associating with it or offering it space.

Never, ever forget the importance of careful word choice to get your point across.

And finally, there’s rhetoric’s stepchild, debate, who never really seems to be in trouble but is definitely out of control.

And people say public debate never solves anything. Tsk tsk.

Well time to try to go to sleep now, wish me luck!

Shoot without a Target

There is a situation that I have trouble dealing with in teaching debate to beginning students. It is the situation when a student demands absolute rules for how to debate the “right” way.

This comes from high rationality and the enlightenment mostly, and is also found in a highly scientific and absoutist worldview. This si the result of a system of teaching and learning that instists on the removal of pobability in favor of certainty as the end of education.

So it becomes hard to teach such students who are very comfortable and insistent upon such standards to do well (or to act at all) to embrace probability as not only an inevitable condition, but a positive good.

I didnt have much luck today engaging with a student like this on this issue and it made me realize the necessity of having a good strategy for proving this to students who want certainty and a list of rules for how to debate well.

The one thing that I was reliant on in the past was how archery is taught in Japan, or how it is done along the lines of traditional zen thinking at least – how the target isnt given to the student at all until after the student has shot wihtout one often times for many years. Students express the same frustrations about this sort of thing in those situations.

The target must be removed so that argumentation can improve or a t least be taught well. But can this be done? The modernist sentiment and deep track of argumentation theory would say no. So this leads us to the possibility of abandoning argumentation theory from the modernist tradition. But without that, argumentation theory loses great gains (burden of proof, presumption, evidence standards, etc). In fact you could argue that it wouldnt be recognizable as argumentation theory at all.

We could turn to Burke and go for identification/division, but again this is a target. How does one shoot without a target in argumentation?

I suppose the idea of the universal audience is where we are left, but again one has a target. Maybe distnquishing the idea of Target and target might be productive? Perhaps this is the distinction that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca make between demonstration and argumentation is exactly the distinction I want between targeted and non-targeted argumentation.

It's Not Just Rhetoric

Often times I feel a bit sad that we in the field of rhetoric and argumentation suffer from having a public intellectual who is from our field. I know it’s a bit selfish and somewhat narrow-minded to think this way – after all, every public intellectual is an intellectual engaged in the idea of public controversy or debate on some level – but it’s the attention to those subjects as such that I long for.

Well today I was relieved to learn I’m not alone. Here’s an article about anthropology’s struggle with the same thing.

Anthropology has been a field engaged in unraveling itself ever since the post-structuralist turn. This article made a lot of interesting claims that perhaps could bring attention back to that field.

Meanwhile I await the emergence of the rhetorician/argument theorist who will start our own public intellectual practice.

Another Aspect of Neoliberal

Stanley Fish actually had a good blog post the other day. Go figure.

Usually I disagree with him, but his analysis was very good. Covers an aspect of neoliberalism that I don’t often complain about, although I’m quite good at complaining about neoliberalism.

Just like the neoconservatives, the neoliberals see things in two-dimensional, flat, uncreative, unimaginative, over-simplistic, anti-materialist and naive terms.

But I don’t have the time right now to tell you how I really feel about them.

Kids Today

Outstanding article in the Washington Post this week about the crappy reading selections that undergraduates make. So timely as on Thursday I was suggesting a couple of good Spring Break books and one of my students was making a terribly confused face – he looked downright revolted. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, “Why would you read on Spring Break?” It was delivered in a tone that should be reserved for claims about having seen Bigfoot, a Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster.

However, for an interesting antidote to that venom, try one of the best blogs you aren’t reading, Future Majority, for their take on the issue. I think it’s interesting if we live in a world where undergraduates are not reading literature that is socially redeeming, but in the classroom the value structure that allows for such a literary hierarchy is being undermined by the professors in favor of social connections. Perhaps it’s spurious.

Should pragmatism be a higher value of the University? I think the divide between pragmatism and intellectualism is faulty and needs collapse. I don’t think there is any disagreement here among most people. The question is what kind of collapse? The speed? What percentage of each? A return to Aristotle might be the best move here – the idea of phronesis – which captures the best elements of both as it is currently theorized. Which makes rhetoric the most important, even though least popular, major at the University.

Why is economics so popular? Because it is a rhetoric. It allows for understanding, explanation and manipulation. And it provides criteria to deal with materiality and recalcitrance. The only thing it lacks is awareness of itself as such.