The New York Sophist

Whenever there’s a controversy – gun violence, racism, sexism, or any of the things that occur in the United States with frightening regularity – there is always the call for vibrant national debate on the issues. I have always wondered what journalists mean when they call for “national debate” on a particular issue. Very much like the giant Fezzik in The Princess Bride, I usually think “that word you keep using, I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

The call for national debate is a call for engagement, for persuasion on the issues. That much seems clear. Where I lose the thread is the question of what debate can bring to a controversy that is immediate, hot, and problematic. The combination of those three things is the characteristic invitation to public discourse (somewhat connected to Kenneth Burke’s idea of the characteristic invitation to rhetoric: Identification so close to division that you cannot spot the difference). The call is a hopeful one; a call for clarity, a call for positions that will address the issue and address the need for there to be some action, some response, something to do to ensure some sort of prohibition on the event so it never happens again.

Additionally the rhetoric of such a proposal should explain and calcify the event so that audiences feel that they are safe, that there’s some sort of stability, and the event will never happen again (even though you careful readers have already noticed that I mentioned these events happen with regularity). Do you remember when your parental figure – dad or mom or whoever – would blow on your wounds, the one’s you’d get from falling, failing to ride your bike, or other crazy child activities? That blowing is medically unnecessary – probably even harmful given the bacterial count of the average human mouth – but it helped you feel like things were better. It was an important ritual of healing, and without it you just couldn’t feel better. That’s an essential part of that sort of rhetoric.

So half of the call is a call for clarity through discourse and healing through the act of public discourse. But we still haven’t figured out why there’s a call for national debate. What is it in particular about debate that captures the political imagination here? Why is debate the solution when things are hot, immediate, and frightening?

I think most people recognize in debate a power to provide clarity, or at least clear alternatives in a situation. People also recognize debate as a place where reasons are brought to the surface in a lot more detail than they are in other forms of discourse. It is this twin recognition that pushes people to call for “national debate” when something grabs our attention.

Even though I’m a huge supporter of debate, particularly around public policy questions, I think these calls are misguided. What journalists and others really want is national conversation about these issues, or even national argument. The reason why is that the positions are for our opponents to accept. One of the limits of debate as a discourse is that it is always for an audience who, through tacit agreement in attending the debate or listening to it, does not have an opinion during the course of the debate – or they suspend that view until the end where they will be forced to compare it to what transpired in the debate.

Whenever a trauma occurs in the national scene, we really need discussion or dialogue in order to sort the positions. Debate is only valuable to determine differences between refined positions. Debate does not work very well at refining the positions that could exist in a controversy. Discussion and dialogue do that well. Debate takes those possible positions to the extreme. A debater is obligated to provide the strongest case they can for their take on their side. This helps the audience see plain the motives being articulated and the resulting attitude. This will always invite reticulation in their own mind, or among friends or family, about the layers of the issue.

Whenever there’s a call for more national debate we should pause and consider what it is specifically that debate does for us. What is debate’s strength? What is its weakness? Most of the time we don’t really know the positions and we certainly don’t want corporate media or newsreaders establishing those for us. We need time and we need to wade through some words before we are ready to debate. And we know we are ready to debate when we are ironically certain that we are uncertain about the strength of opposed positions. Debate will very quickly help us sort them and bring other possibilities to the front of our minds.

I set up a substack which I think will become this blog, or a copy of this blog over time.

I think keeping this space alive is important and good for my practices, but probably not the easiest or best way for audiences to do so. It might be a bit easier to get the substack email when I post and read it there.

Blogging is a great art form, something I love to do no matter how infrequently my posts seem to indicate. I really like the challenge and the work. It does great things for my mind and perspective and also confronts me with that never-dull question of audience.

Substack seems like a great tool to curate audience and simultaneously reach “the public,” whatever that might mean to us today.

Please consider signing up for the substack and also check back here for writing as well!

An Idea for a Rhetoric Course that I’ve just never done

For several years I have imagined teaching a course where New York City would be the text that would serve as the readings, course content, the source of student projects, and the object of critical analysis/interpretation. This course I imagined initially many years ago under the title “Arguing New York” – which I still think could be a good way to model the course. Recently though I have become concerned about how writing is thought about among undergraduates. I’m now wondering if I can perhaps modify the course in ways that would serve as something that would de-escalate the intensity and difficulty perceived in writing and most importantly, the idea that writing has to be some final expression, something that will forever be “right” or “true” in terms of argument, perception, or idea.

Of course none of this has anything to do with writing programs or writing centers who do a phenomenal job for those who pass through those courses. The issue is in all other encounters with composition or putting together a text. These encounters in society, media, and the typical way professors talk about final papers in grim terms tend to overwhelm the healthy alternative narratives provided by writing programs. There’s not much more they can do to fight against the tidal forces out there.

Perhaps all faculty could de-escalate the importance of final papers and such, which would be great. But most faculty out there are interested in control, domination, and power, and conflate the idea of a good class with struggle, difficulty, and stress.

The idea of the class is to examine how people compose texts for others about their experiences and feelings in and around New York, as well as how the city is composed in similar ways to elicit certain responses. This hopefully will reduce the act of composition down to all the stress of sharing an experience.

I think the distribution of something like arguments, or even the idea of constructing a meaningful description of a time, place, or event can be a pleasurable experience for people if they start to think of it as the production and creation of meaningful relationships rather than the transmission of accurate historical moments. Too often I think that final papers or “the final paper” as a symbol or an utterance in college classes is described in a way that sucks all the joy and fun out of creating meaning from all these discussions and readings that have happened over the term. Lowering the stakes and inviting a creative evaluation of what that time was like will not only make the assignment less stressful but also probably produce papers that are more interesting to read since they will (hopefully) contain less regurgitated content from the course.

Thinking about what this would look like: Initially I thought that studying the public policy and public social debates of New York City’s history would be fantastic. But this roots students in that too comfortable and fairly useless role of making reports on the ideas of others. Then I thought that perhaps having them reiterate those debates would be good. But that brings with it the problems of role play in the classroom, and how role play often allows the replication of essentialism.

What I’ve finally decided to do is cast the students in the role of poet, or creator (poesis is “make” in ancient Greek) and give them places, scenes, and other such texts in order for them to tease out an attitude about it and offer that to audiences.

This picture that I shared at the top of the post is one I took and perfect for this class. What can be said about it? Someone might want to talk about the space design, or the urban “forest” of steel pillars. It’s also quite obvious that ideas about mass transit, the MTA, the subway experience will come to mind.

The topos of contrast: Maybe a feeling of loneliness in one of the largest cities on earth might be the idea. An empty transit hub – contradiction. Or perhaps the idea that we need to go anywhere. Or what we miss as we focus on our destinations and origins.

There’s history here – what is this station, when was it built? When did it open? What happened here? Perhaps a story of someone who has a significant moment in their life could be constituted from this photo. Fiction.

This creation not only lowers the stakes of writing but makes it a rhetorical challenge – how can I reach my audience; how can I get them to share this attitude – but also is the life of the city itself. A city is not the structures; it’s response and reiteration – when the everyday commute is interrupted by a glance or a stumble, a spill or a shock – and how we come to terms literally with that addition to our hermetic narrative of our lives.

I hope to teach this course at some point. I think it would be best for one particular venue – when students come together from another place to live and work in NYC – but more specifics on that opportunity later when – or if – it’s offered to me.

In planning a course, my mind tends to wander. I think about what it would be like to be in that course, and what it would look like as a failure and as a success. What do students say about it? What can they say? What options do they have after the course in terms of ways of thinking, doing, interacting with society and with other people?

Perhaps these questions are limited to my field of communication, but I’d risk saying that every course should consider these questions as it comes together. Thinking in terms of human action and ability is really a great way to think about how to use that class time when it comes around. Instead of offering up things that are essential elements of the course, or the thing that have to be “in there,” we can think of our course as the presentation of resources that will help the students change their attitude, feelings, or actions in relation to the world.

I’ve never taught legal argumentation before and I don’t have any formal education in the law. My focus in this class is going to help the students realize that any belief, any substantive value that they have in the law or the Constitution of the United States is a construct that is established and maintained by the principles and practices of argumentation and rhetoric. We are persuaded that the Constitution should govern us, and that persuasive work started at ratification and is adaptive and ongoing.

This is in contradiction to what students expect I bet. I think they want to make lawyer-style arguments – the kind they’ve seen on TV – and perform the sort of oratory in the name of justice. This is a great image, but most people who perform such arguments are not lawyers but actors portraying lawyers.

The powerful centerpiece of this course planning, for me, is the desire to get students to appreciate and understand that the reason people have such faith in the Constitution is due to rhetorical argument. It is incredibly flimsy when you think of it that way, but the payoff is that rhetorical argument can constitute other relationships to and with the law, as well as the law itself. This might gain deeper appreciation for the idea that the conversation doesn’t “end” when the “right” has been determined, but the right must be constantly rearticulated and defended in order to have value. To not be able to speak about something and provide reasons that reach others for one’s point of view is not democratic in nature. Repetition is not democratic speech.

So with this in mind, I hope the students are able to find, through the course, a way to consider their opinions and arguments about the law valuable as is, whether they are lawyers or not. Learning how lawyers argue might demystify the authority they have when they realize it’s very limited in scope, limited in ability and for particular purposes. But arguing about the law is everyone’s duty in a democracy. This is much more expansive, normative, and comprehensive I’d say.

So half the class will be about arguing like a lawyer, the other half arguing about the normative status of the law, the function of the law, and the like. That’s the plan so far. I will update my progress as it goes as I think it might be interesting to pull back the curtain a bit on course design, at least my method, in hopes that it starts a conversation about it, or perhaps encourages you to see how easy it would be to design a course for yourself or your friends.

Stealing this title, sorry John Durham Peters

One of my favorite (yet scary) childhood films is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a movie that thanks to Disney Plus has recently re-entered my life.

The scene I would like to show I can’t find, but it’s when the harpooner Ned Land (played by Kirk Douglas) prepares a number of messages in a bottle giving the position of the Nautilus away. The ending of the movie is of course, the U.S. Navy showing up and blasting the submarine to bits. Of course, I could write a lot here about how the militaries of the world united against Nemo and his campaign to end the production of weapons by sinking ships that were transporting the materiel of war just so they could conduct more war, but that’s a different topic.

Instead, I think this idea of Ned Land tossing all these messages into bottles in the sea is a better vision of what I’m doing on the internet these days than the much more admirable and academic treatment of “speaking into the air” as special and magical as that act can be. Speaking into the sea doesn’t really cut it, and speaking into the air makes sense if there are some interlocutors out there that you are aware of and can see. No point shouting AHOY at the waves.

We’ll see if any of these Ned Land bottles reach anyone. Hopefully you are not going to be persuaded to come send my Nautilus to the bottom of the sea.