The New York Sophist

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.

It only took one episode before we had a guest show up to the lonely office hour. This episode is about perception in the classroom and how to use it as a resource – if you can?

A Foray into Vlogging

I have been interested in vlogging for quite a while now but never thought about really committing to it till this past week. I’m a bit overloaded with teaching responsibilities (hence the lack of updates here) but focusing on teaching only makes mental ground more fertile. That would make teaching a wonderful source of energy, but at the same time teaching drains you in weird ways. So it’s the frustration of having a lot of things to write and speak about but no energy or time to really get anything going.

This is a gift to myself. I have already made detailed plans about the spring term and what I’ll do with my “extra time” I willed into existence by taking advantage of the opportunity to teach so much. More on that in a later post.

For now, here’s the first installment of the Lonely Office Hour, my vlog about professor stuff. I hope to make one regularly, so if you are interested subscribe here or at YouTube to be notified when new episodes appear.

Democracy versus Accuracy

Democracy functions on the basis of opinion sharing. These opinions are perspectives based on life experiences, orientations, and attitudes (lots of Kenneth Burke language here). What makes democracy work well is a swirling of shared opinions with the intent to persuade. We can’t do much else other than file in and vote for who we like without some pressure or pushback on our personal thoughts. Humans came to be what we are today through developing communication not as a tool, but as a place to live. We have to share points of view with one another that are ours. Democracy suffers because we now do not share our views. We share the views of endless media outlets, podcasts, and other consumptive media and repeat those views. So many opinions turn into a few, and those few are amplified through repetition.

The most damaging legacy from Trump, at least rhetorically, is that now anyone who reinforces terrible American policy that was pre-Trump will be viewed as some liberating or open-minded force. The political good has been conflated with the politically expedient, comfortable, and normal, leaving people feeling happy and comfortable that the United States does nothing to help with postcolonial issues of their own making, global market hegemony, militarization, unfair and unjust labor, and so much more.

Herbert Marcuse put out a great warning about this in his book One Dimensional Man where he talked about capitalism and capitalist-oriented authority trying to eliminate the difference between the “ought” and the “is.” The post-Trump legacy is a very seamless conflation of the two. Biden is not the only choice, but a good choice; his election was a good thing not an emergency measure. This kind of thinking is exceedingly dangerous as anyone who is hyper-critical of Joe Biden will be associated with being pro-Trump. I find this to be the case any time I criticize Biden – I am then subjected to hearing about how bad Trump was. This is not a problem, as Trump is easy to critique. However, what’s missing is any sort of political imaginary for a better system. Instead of re-imagining the kind of immigration system we’d want, or the sort of foreign aid we should provide, we endlessly talk about how destructive Trump was to both systems and how happy we are that he is no longer running those systems. This allows us to uncritically praise oppressive capitalist policies that the United States often employs.

It’s hard to find the rhetorical strategy to allow people to imagine. But this is why the Democrats love Donald Trump. They no longer have to defend or justify anything they do – they can just gesture toward Trump. “Would you rather have that?” they ask. It’s a no-brainer. Of course we don’t want someone as thinly-sighted as Trump with that much authority over U.S. policy. But we don’t want Joe Biden either. What is needed is a complete wipe of such incremental politics and a fundamental grappling, and re-imagining of the United States, a coming to terms – possibly new terms – with what role the country should play for itself and others in the world. First we should recognize that much of the current world is an effect or result of American policy in the first place – are we happy with the bed we’ve made?

Returning to a creative approach to the political – what do I believe and how does it relate to everything I’ve heard and seen – is what should be taught as critical thinking, not “evaluate the source so you can repeat the facts.” Such an approach isn’t teaching anything except how to be a passive consumer of thought versus a thinker.

I discovered Doctor Who when I was starting high school. Late Saturday nights on PBS stories were shown without breaks for hours and hours every week. I loved watching it and thinking about how incredibly strange and radical the ideas in the show were. Without internet, I also wondered how or why British TV shows were so long. Only later did I figure out it was episodic.

John Pertwee who was the third doctor (my favorite) once said in an interview that he thought the Doctor was a boring know-it-all cruising through space – or something like that – and decided he would add in some bits of dialogue to humanize the doctor, or well, make him seem a lot less like a intergalactic know it all and more like an adventurer. The current show with all its backstories, twists, and recurrent characters I think owes a bit of a debt to Pertwee’s idea here.

I think the difference between classic who and contemporary who tracks on the difference of public attitudes toward science and knowledge. Contemporary versions of the Doctor are a lot more certain and a lot more committed to a particular base of knowledge that companions can’t really access – although they can understand. In classic who, the Doctor would be as in the dark as his human companions however he had something they did not – a method of inquiry and a process of working through a moment or a situation to determine what he should do (or more often not do).

The 2005 reboot is a product of its time – here’s a guy who is an expert on the future, science, history, everything. This might not really be possible or even desirable among a time travelling scholar. Commitment to a certain mode of inquiry – the kind the 3rd and 4th doctors represented best – is not only more reasonable to imagine in relation to time travel, but could also be a very good model for us when we encounter the novel and inexplicable.

Recent episodes, since the end of the 10th doctor to today are all about the Doctor’s psychology and personal traumas. This resonates with our contemporary situation where trauma, personal experience, and known innner truth have taken the lead in public discourse, inquiry, politics, and the like. Instead of questions, the Doctor has answers. And those answers are only revealed in the last act. We, the audience are to marvel at the Doctor not stand beside them. We are to be impressed, not seeing how easy it would be to think, believe, and act like the Doctor.

It’s not possible to know all the history, science, and meaning of cultures across every point in space time. It’s also unreasonable to think personal trauma and feeings would be able to be mapped across culture and civilization through space and time. It’s not possible for us to do either on one planet with one creature (humans). It’s better to think of Doctor Who as a show about how we should encounter the strange and new – with a process of inquiry, interactivity, and uncertainty – rather than the idea that we know or have felt what others have.