Boston

reconceptualizing travel

The end of the pandemic is the opening up of travel for me, which has been a pretty amazing time.

Enjoyed nearly a week in Boston exploring the art and food of the city, and thinking quite a bit about the privilege of travel. I’m lucky to be able to take trips, see people, and have experiences to think and write about.

The thing about travel is it always creates more demand for itself. The trip is upcoming – it happens in your mind as a fantasy or a prediction. The trip begins. You can’t wait to get there. You experience the going as anticipation of arrival. You have the trip. You imagine yourself remembering the fantastic moments while living them. You compare your experiences to your predictive fantasy. You are going home. You wonder about the trip and remember it as you miss the trip home again. At home, you wonder where the trip took place, when it happened, what counts, and what was left out/behind.

Travel has taken on a powerful meaning of freedom and ability for me, along with joy and gratitude. For a very long time travel was a part of my teaching. I took students all around the world. It was a great time doing that, but it was always coupled with anxiety and concern about their safety, experience, and other things that could go wrong. I didn’t really like travelling as such during that time because it was pretty exhausting.

Now I can’t imagine feeling that way and I’m somewhat embarrassed that I would look forward to the end of trips sometimes. I think it might have just been the stress of responsibility or care for others, both physically and psychologically. I think I’d be better at it today.

Rhetoric teaches us that meanings often come from what we preconceive of being there in the thing or the moment as we encounter it. We look for what we assume to be there and then confirm its presence. Travel is no different. It’s hard for me to imagine what meanings I used to easily find in travel. Now it’s very easy to see it as something really special. The trick is to understand that whatever you look for you’ll find it – it wasn’t really there at all, you brought it in yourself.

The most well-known version of this idea comes from the film The Empire Strikes Back where Luke enters the cave, fights Darth Vader, decapitates him and realizes he’s decapitated himself. The better version of this is the Ox Herding Woodcuts, carved around 15th c. Korea and detail the story of a young man going into the woods to find and tame an ox. He learns from this experience that there was no ox, just himself there, and he tamed his own mind.

My friend tells me of a stolen Buddhist temple bell that is in a park somewhere in Boston. We seek after it, like the ox, and have the conversation about the ox herding pictures. We look up after some walking, and see the ox. We then took photos with it. The question then becomes: What did we take pictures of or with? It seems clear I took a photo here of my conceptions that I brought with me on the hunt for the bell. Or ox. Or whatever I thought was out there.

Maybe this ancient story of the ox is a good way to keep preconceptions where they should be – on our minds, from our minds – not received from out in the world (where we most likely put them). This might be a good way to keep travel where it should be – a conception that can and should change before it becomes anything else.

Rhetoric Itself

Teaching rhetoric is a lot more like teaching art or creative writing than it is some sort of job skill. But you wouldn’t know that to look at what passes for a public speaking class these days. Farewell creativity, hello corporate conformity.

Strangely, departments that are dedicated to inquiry against ideological systems and the exposure of the ideological structure of the natural order are perfectly comfortable offering courses that are little more than box-ticking in terms of what type of speech you do, how many sources you have, and whether or not you have the three parts of the introduction completed properly.

This practice of fitting things into measurable units of reality (or whatever you’d call it) is a global trend. We are obsessed with conforming because conformity is measurable. We don’t have to think too much about it to understand it or place meaning on it. If we can look at it, and see if it has the parts, we are good.

Propriety is another way to define rhetoric. Concerns about decorum and appropriateness have always been subjects taught by rhetoricians, have sparked controversies, and are also powerful ways to thread the needle in argument if you are aware of and comfortable with the edge of the edge of the line. But part of appropriateness is being able to appreciate and understand just how close to the edge a rhetor can get. This requires some work, some creative attenuation to the moment by the listener and speaker, and is often lost in the desire to present it the “way it should be.” Although this appears to be propriety, it misses the mark. It’s propriety on propriety’s terms, not the contingent sense of the moment’s propriety as interpreted by the audience, waiting to be constituted with words.

This adherence to propriety is costly. Now we see nothing but cynical snippets and angry shouting in society. When we see a speech, it’s a drab, formal, and sad reading of an essay. The only people out there maintaining a semblance of the power of oratory are the storytellers and the slam poets. Remember the amount of media attention that Amanda Gorman received after delivering a poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration? If only Presidents could speak like this.

Rhetoric has been and will continue to be the creative art of influence. People will always need to create meaning out of a numbered of fractured bits of perception, time honored practices, and deeply held commitments to value. They will either be compelled to do this by community, friends, or family or they might feel that burning pressure in their heart to speak out against or for events and words surrounding them. Either way, the duty of the rhetoric teacher is to ensure that they are prepared to do so both mentally and emotionally.

Without this preparation one of the most vital forces in creating identity, community, and meaning that leads to induce important action just won’t happen. We are already seeing it through social media’s working over of our communicative norms – sharing memes with those who already agree with us is hardly inspirational. The orator has the capacity to cut through the situation with well placed words, getting everyone to reform themselves as the audience in the contingent moment, ready to discuss, consider, and act when the time is right.

Legal Argumentation Course Update

Spoiler: I did not follow the Four Book Rule

A couple of posts ago I mentioned I’m prepping a course in legal argumentation to run in September 2021. I’ve made a lot of progress on the course and thought I’d update you all on what’s going on with it.

Books!

First and most importantly are books. I did not follow the much celebrated “Four Book Rule” that I wrote about previously. The reason why is that some of the books are not books for the course but are reference and research books for some of the things that we’ll do in the class.

The books will be peppered with a couple of readings here and there. I am considering starting with some Critical Race Theory readings as law is it’s starting place. Given the heated conversation the media is having about Critical Race Theory I think that starting there would be a nice way to communicate the importance of the law in larger discourses, and how the discourse of the law has been seriously challenged.

Another good place to start would be with a very particular legal case. I’m thinking of the challenge to President Trump’s so-called “Travel Ban” brought against the government by the ACLU and heard in the U.S. Fourth Circuit. These readings might be related to these two possible opening acts.

For the CRT opening act, Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado are top choices. For the 4th circuit case whatever I could find about the basis of the challenge and the reasons that they sued the government. Maybe even the transcript. Tempted to just jump right in.

Scope!

Since I’m a rhetorician and a sophist on top of that, I can’t help but find continuous unfolding multiple meanings in any phrase. “Legal Argumentation” has the obvious interpretation that the course should teach people how to argue within the law – how to argue like a lawyer would argue. But also just as interesting is the scope of how we argue about the law – the normative aspects of it, existence, it’s history, and all that. So that will be the other half of the course. That part of the course is following the (blessed) Four Book Rule. In that part we’ll take a look at the two shortest books and then engage Fiss and Chemerinsky together to create a vision of a law system that would respond to the critiques in some degree.

Stuff to Do!

The first part will be re-adjudicating some cases that are of some recent interest to the students or for whatever sorts of issues they care about the most. The second part is questioning the judicial system from the outside using argumentation. I think it’s a good combination.

My interest these days in in having students create arguments about things they feel and think about the texts. I’m trying to dismiss with reporting on the meaning of the text entirely, and using any semblance of that as a starting point for the generation of new texts that are in conversations and inspire new conversations about the readings.

Outcomes!

After the course is over I hope the students will be able to create some entry-level arguments the way lawyers would as well as gain a critical appreciation for listening to legal argument.

I also hope they are able to marshal arguments against our legal system as well as defend it using the practice and familiarity with the readings and the critiques of the law they are going to get in the books and other readings.