The New York Sophist

I think that many media companies will not be able to resist the symbolic value of owning a Broadway theater. Get ready for the Netflix theater, the Amazon theater, the Epic Games theater, the Dreamworks theater, and on and on.

All will run live theater shows like Fortnite and Trolls World Tour as sort of spruced up versions of touring ice shows for children. Broadway might become midwestern-style family entertainment if a number of theaters are sold. 

But Broadway does not make a lot of money, and is more for awards and acclaim that you are a “real artist” making “art.” So of that grouping I think only Jeff Bezos would be happy to take the kind of losses that you have to take in Broadway to get Tony award recognition. I think that he is the most likely to be able to adopt the mindset of many Broadway producers. 

Broadway had already lost a lot of its experimental attitude and edge pushing over the last 20 years or so. What was closed when Broadway went dark for the quarantine? Well, musicals that were mostly combinations of hit songs with a convoluted plot written around them, most likely inspired by the success of Jersey Boys – which continues to make money in many ways. People are designing around that. 

The most innovative and interesting Broadway theater either was a hit or a miss. The Great Comet was an amazing, innovative, new musical, as was Hamilton, but the difference is so great there that one wonders what to model. Both seem to have a similar formula, but one just really hit. 

The formula of Rent, another monster success that was risky was to take an old opera and modernize it – something out of the Oscar Hammerstein school of musical-writing. This is the sort of thing he had Stephen Sondheim do when he was teaching him how to write musical theater. 

Hamilton is taking historical characters and retelling their lives through contemporary forms of music. But The Great Comet wasn’t doing that? I mean, Chernow’s book is almost as long as War and Peace. And there are a lot of historical moments in both that aren’t entirely narrative. But I guess the question is what is going to hit a nerve – something you can’t ever predict. 

In rhetoric, my field of study, we often say that the rhetor can call into being the audience that he or she wants to have before them. This is done by the rhetor addressing who they imagine will be out there, and what they want them to be receptive to. The rhetor creates an appetite among the people to be a certain kind of person, or push forward a certain attitude or set of values, and then the rhetor addresses that concoction.  I wonder how hard this would be to do in Broadway?

My feeling is that great American theater has always been pushing audiences to a better version of themselves by making them the promise that if they accept something a little bit off from what they would ask for, they will be a lot better off for it. Instead of whistling the catchy tunes as you walk to the subway, you are perhaps considering how to feel about the central characters, and how the music amplifies the ease or difficulty you have in accepting the attitude you have. 

I think this element of theater is one of the best elements of it, and the Broadway musical is a very powerful and creative form of theater for the exploration of how to make audiences better groups of people. Or maybe what I mean is that well-constructed theater has the power to force audiences to reconsider who they are while they take on the role of an observer. They are asked to take in a performance as a group, and the group is called into being as a theater audience in particular ways, then they watch actions and reactions, declarations and engagements between people who could be them or could never be them, then they are asked to leave with all of that experience. What are they meant to do? I think they are given a rare shot to reflect on themselves as not-themselves, or as an audience to a play reflect on motives that could very well be their own in similar circumstances, which a well designed play might hint to them are pretty close to their own circumstances. In short – Burkean identification/division. I know you are so surprised.

In the end I think rhetoricians are concerned with this same thing if they really investigate what they are asking audiences to do when they speak to them. After all they are speaking to the construct they have made of them in their mind, the words are always addressed to who the rhetor believes to be out there. Theater does this too with the hope that the performances will be believed. And if they are, what changes? What stays the same?

I hope that there are still Broadway theaters left to explore these questions after the pandemic comes to an end. I hope they can hold out. I know that they are supposed to begin reopening after Labor Day, which seems too late, but it might be too early. We don’t know enough about the virus to say either way yet.

Always a bit of whiplash to read the brilliant work in composition studies. I really shouldn’t do it; it depresses me when I compare it to the seething vista of nonsense that counts as pedagogy in speech communication. There’s nothing but discussions of how to grade, how annoyed they are at students, and how teaching public speaking is beneath a scholar of their importance (don’t look at the Taylor & Francis journal circulation stats if this is you, you’ll be very upset!).

Public speaking is a composition course, it’s a course that investigates the question of how to produce meaningful texts for audiences. This no doubt involves a ton of other questions, such as ethics (when, where and how should this be done, if at all?) and epistemology (how do we know we mean something; how do people constitute, reject, and receive meaning?). For some reason, we wait till some esoteric high-level rhetorical theory or criticism course to engage all this. We should be engaging it in public speaking. 

The problem is two-fold as I see it. First, we (communication professors) have discounted public speaking as unimportant (or “punishment” as one scholar I heard call it). So we don’t consider it worthy of our theory, criticism, or other “high level” rhetorical practices. 

Also our field has found it appropriate for some bizarre reason to excommunicate debate and forensic activity to the basement, or some remote place away from the department, placed it in the hands of sports enthusiasts rather than educators, and has built as many barriers as they can between the department and the forensics program. The attitude in most departments is: “We really are proud of what you are doing, but please stay out of the conference room during the day.”

This has the effect of eliminating any valuable pedagogical crossover between those who directly practice performances, under various conditions, for audiences who are there to evaluate and improve those performances. Although saddled down a bit too much by competitive norms (a problem with any vanguard audience) this kind of reiterative, practice-oriented pedagogy is invaluable in a course that is presumably about the question of how to create meaningful texts for audiences with your body and voice. 

With both of our most powerful resources as a field held at bay from the course that sustains us, funds our graduate programs, funds our departments, etc, what are we left with as the content of public speaking? Outlines, works cited pages, attendance, and mobile phone use seem to be the most frequently graded things in public speaking. 

A very bad narrative of persuasion is in there too: Facts are all you need. Ethos is our cool word for “expert.” If an expert says it, you’re an idiot if you don’t listen to them (history shows this to be a very bad idea). Pathos is our cool word for feelings; make sure you get angry at racism and essentialism when you see it (don’t worry, it’s obvious what it looks like). Logos is logic, which pretty much means use facts and believe facts. Occasionally there’s a fallacy quiz (maybe just one; this isn’t argumentation after all!). And that’s about it.

What the course should be is an infusion of our best theories and our best pedagogies. This means that we should be teaching crucial concepts to students in public speaking such as the pentad, second/third/fourth persona, identification/division, quasi-logical argumentation, universal audience, constitutive audience theory, topoi, the commonplaces (the work of Michael Leff is valuable here for selecting readings for class), and so on – the works. And we should be engaging them in the dynamic, reiterative, interactive energy of our forensics and debate instructors. Amazing transformative education comes out of moments of peer engagement – writing center pedagogy relies on this axiom as an article of faith – and we have a very unique resource for this through forensics and debate. This is of course if we really want to make better speakers and give up our perverse pleasure of telling stories about how bad the reasoning is among our public speaking students (I hear these stories all the time; I think they are meant to be humorous).  It’s telling that public speaking instructors never share stories of excellent, mind-blowing speeches. Compositionists often share parts of essays in their research from students that are pretty engaging. We don’t do any public speaking scholarship like that. 

I did write here a few weeks ago that I was going to be proposing some public speaking ideas, so this one might be the first: 

The aim of the course is to practice the creation of texts meant to mean something for audiences.

That’s the best way I can summarize this starting point. I think there are a lot of petitios here, which makes it not a fallacy, but a rich site of inquiry. What is a text? What does it mean to create a text? What does it mean to mean something? And what is an audience?

From those simple begged question alone, an entire public speaking course can be created. Make those the headings. Select 2 or 3 readings for each. Have the students speak about the readings. And at the end of each unit, time to reiterate a speech they have been working on all term. 

Sometimes I’ve had a class all speak about the same topic, sometimes I have them change. I like this model, as we are working on a piece (eg. forensic competition) and making it better. I think that’s a great invitation to bring in those practices and make public speaking valuable. We need to do something. Most of you out there reading this think public speaking is a waste of your pedagogical and scholarly talents.

I can only agree with you. Let’s make it a course worthy of our field, not some right of passage we put graduate students through.

Feeling kinda useless right now. Wish I was a bit more helpful or had some means to be helpful. I am still a firm believer that formal education is one of our finest ways to avoid the state of affairs we find ourselves in. This education is unfairly constructed, serves the interests of established power, and is unfairly distributed. So even my best hope is hopelessly corrupted by the very thing that it purports to address.

I see around me the results of a world that has taught us to value facts above people. If you are a criminal, you cannot change. If you are a cop, you cannot change, situations are as they are. People are types. They are not going to change. People are bad or good. States are bad or good. All of this means persuasion is impossible. Time to replicate the truth until others get it.

Everyone gleefully shares the same posts on social media to accomplish this and it’s just sad, but I can understand that, because I too am feeling very useless at the moment, and it would be great to pretend that something like that – or something like this post – had any bearing or use on the situation. I love to think that by writing this I am being helpful when helpfulness – the very concept of helping out – seems so distant that it feels exhausting to conceptualize it.

Writing is often thought of as an alternative to violence, as a way to solve problems without resorting to violence. But rhetoric (writing is that of course) more often is complicit in violence as a masked form of violence, as coercion, as a way to hide power behind reason and force others into the position of rejecting reasonable objectivity when they want to make their position known. Rhetoric also requires practice, and time for such practice is predicated on wealth, status, and resources. Space. And time. All things that are deprived to those because of how we have chosen to organize things. 

It feels good and is pleasurable to speak to a vanguard. It’s frightening and difficult to speak to a public. I wish this was the first line in every public speaking textbook out there, but it’s not. It immediately begins speaking to the vanguard, as a vanguard, preparing the vanguard for more conversation. I guess I would like a Public Cringing course, or another good title for a public speaking class, “Nervously Loquacious,” apologies to Kenneth Burke.

Uncertainty should be taught more than it is. Respect for it and life with it. Professors spend a hell of a lot of time degrading and discounting student work over citation form, but don’t comment on how few non-whites appear in the references. They don’t comment on how the use of Google reinforces the perspective of consumer, while searching in a library reinforces . . . what? Is it possible to think outside of consumer? Apparently not. The Minnesota situation is troubling because the only political grammar is consumer objects. Move over internet of things. Welcome, politics of things. 

The only thing I can think of that might be helpful is to sit with the question, “why?” Sitting with one question, letting it think you as much as you think it, letting it explore itself and you observe that exploration, is, I’ve found, a good way to not get caught up in the machinery of power, to accept that feeling when it shows up and let it speak, but let other interpretations speak as well. We need more than a light switch for political conversation, but most things fall into the light switch model. 

Sitting with “Why?” and letting it ask itself and preserving the space and time is an alternative political position. Why? Because stillness, quiet, and thought are not valued in consumer society. Speed, branding, PR, announcements, and ROI are valued. This is maybe not a good way to arrange things. But it’s all we have left as a political rhetoric. 

Why? – the pentadic equivalent is “purpose.” So I guess I’m suggesting creating a pentadic ratio purpose-purpose here (if you are a Burkean). “Why ask why?” – perfectly fine. Letting the question lead is what is needed now so we can fully explore the roots, the situation, the scope, the entirety of why, the whole atlas of why, to begin to address the next question, should it ever appear.

Tried to sing this title to the tune of “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” but no luck. It appears now that I won’t have access to play the game until 4AM tomorrow, so no dice tonight. 

Been writing a lot, but not here, so here’s a post that contains several threads, kind of like an appetizer sampler plate like we used to get at restaurants back in the day.

Terminal Illin’

The Term is over, and now I’m chillin. Thinking about the term a lot, and I have been writing out an extension of some of my public speaking ideas I hinted at in the last post, but the overall feeling of the term is that it is good that it is over, and not all illnesses are virus-bourne. My self-diagnosis is:

• I assign too much work for students to do

• That work is  primarily writing-heavy. If it’s not, it’s not “serious”

• This means the courses have a negative expectation, i.e. “What will this class take” is the first question rather than “What will I get?” as the first response to the class session. 

• Video chat is not the model for course delivery online (webex, zoom, etc). This is not a classroom and a classroom is not needed, it is accidental to teaching.

The prescription is:

• Assign less, or if you do the same amount lower the stakes. Like a lot.

• Become fluid and comfortable in oral assessment. Helps with the stakes to make an assignment to record some oral responses to questions on your phone and post them.

• Writing-intensive does not mean writing-heavy. When assigning writing, make sure that it is attended to, not a background mode of transmission of the evidence of learning.

• Treat class as episodic, and resolution driven – with arcs – so the expectation becomes “What will I get today” when engaging with the class. Explore playwriting/scriptwriting for ideas.

• Streaming is the way a class should go. See Twitch. Streaming with a chat room. That will increase engagement joy and positive expectation. 

So now time to get the technical parts of all this arranged at some point in the summer. Lower the stakes, increase the frequency, don’t fall prey to the idea that writing is somehow more real or superior to the oral (Derrida), and increase frequency of student/professor verbal interaction plus decrease time of assessment of exercises. 

Learning to transition totally to Discord as well, which is a steeper learning curve than I thought looking at everything from Blackboard that it is going to need to replicate. We’ll only have to visit Blackboard for formal grading I think. I can deliver all feedback and commentary on assignments via Blackboard, and students can easily post work for peer review and commentary. 

Podcasting

I think podcasting is the future of higher ed more or less, and what got me thinking about it is how easy it is to produce for those of us on the teaching side of things, how easy it is to share it, and how nice of an advertisement it becomes for our university when we make them somewhat public. 

The value of digital audio is underrated. It’s low bandwidth (can be downloaded quickly onto any device with any sort of bad internet). Takes up little space (MP3 and Org Vorbis are very small files). You are immersed in it if it’s prepared well (all teachers should have a decent, stereo microphone, at least a condenser USB for this, but still cheaper than cameras/video production for YouTube) and the student can listen while doing other things (elder/childcare, housework, family business work, food prep, etc.) All this and a phone is a natural place to consume it makes it ideal in my mind for course delivery. 

Studying how to present on radio, how to voiceover, and how to speak dynamically and interestingly for the ear is on the list. I model someone I think is quite good at speaking for radio, Dan Patrick, a sports journalist who has a morning sports talk show on AM radio nationally in the U.S. There are other models as well. 

Delivering a whole course through high-quality, episodic audio, with conversations and with a bend toward it being desirable to listen to would be the model. Practicing that with the re-launch of In the Bin, which seems to be taking off pretty well. 

The Library

I’m always grateful to have a research library, but today after looking for a book and realizing that it is locked away in my university library with no way to get to it for the foreseeable future, I am even more grateful for the amount of digital resources out there. 

Feeling very lucky to have great internet, and after tweaking this terrible Verizon FIOS router today a few times, I think I finally have apartment-wide coverage that won’t stutter or hesitate, or go dark for a few minutes at least a couple of times a day.

Internet access is so important that I wonder if the university is doing it wrong. Why not give the students a subsidy of some kind for home internet, or wireless internet from their phone provider (hotspot, etc) and pay for that by reducing the quality of the internet provided on campus? I know private carriers in New York City, even the public WiFi offered through the kiosks sometimes feels faster than our campus WiFi, so why invest so heavily in it?

I’m also way behind where I wanted to be on my book that I’m writing, and I have a couple of other ideas for drafts of things to get out before September. Already finished one book chapter, and waiting on a round of edits for a second to come back to me. Working on a couple of essays too. But honestly, when I really look at my workflow, the things that are most engaging and most exciting to work on are the prepared orations for podcasting. There’s something really incredible about preparing to speak. This is why I can’t be a composition teacher even though I know I would love to be one. Composition is so important, but it’s also so narrow. Oratory is my thing, pretty certain of it now, and although I might not be great at it, I really do enjoy working on it, preparing it, and thinking about how it’s going to be heard. I like thinking about the audience out there, hearing it, and wondering what they must be thinking; what they weren’t thinking before they heard what I said, how I said it.

Finished with my grade submission, so I’ve been doing some reading and watching these amazing bird feeder videos. They are so great, and I get to see a lot of birds I wouldn’t normally see. I don’t have a yard, or really any good scenery here in my New York City apartment, so this is the next best thing. It’s probably better, honestly than the wildlife I could attract with a feeder of my own.

Done with grades, but what’s my grade? What’s my mark for the term? I seriously failed, and I think the reason is that I have a strange, compartmentalized view of public speaking.

I think public speaking should be the performance of a certain kind of discourse that is marked for me with the signs of caring about audience. I don’t really know how else to do it, but what I need to figure out is how to get students to create, and how to evaluate, compositions not marked for me.

One way I was thinking of doing this was to mire the students in some discourse about an issue. The task would be to learn what the tropes, commonplaces, and other features of the discourse are, and try to extract or determine principles from the discourse.

I see this in three levels:
Deriving principles from a question

Deriving principles from a statement

Deriving principles from a discourse

All three are very different in my mind, and might require some future writing here about each one. For this post, I think it’s sufficient to say that we would try to trace back to whatever supports, or is assumed to be real, that is being articulated at the point of the creation of the discourse. We could call it perspective; many from the American rhetorical tradition might call this grounding, or backing, after Toulmin’s work.

The point is to find grounding for things like facts and evidence, not to teach these concepts in the abstract, like so many people in my field do. Something a communication scholar should never say is “The reason that speech is unpersuasive is because you didn’t have good facts in it!” This is ideological and unsupported by research in persuasion, argumentation, communication, et. al. Go down the list, you’ll see that nobody supports this view, even if they want to, because ironically, the research doesn’t support it.

Giving the students the tools of being able to articulate whatever the beliefs are of a discourse group and find handholds in that group seems like a practice they can carry around with them so they can ensure, or at least give themselves a chance to give their words purchase in a situation. Public speaking is an art, a situational art, that is derived from the moment when one interjects and has to speak, or calls a group of people together under the term audience, either implicitly or explicitly. It is not a formal set of skills and rules where one ensures one has 3 book sources for an “informative speech,” whatever the hell that is.

The future is not looking good right now for the university, so all fields should do some soul searching to find out their own principles and practices, what keeps their field alive and interesting; what makes it something that someone would want to be a part of, be included in, and think about for the rest of their lives. In rhetoric you’d think we would have a huge advantage here – but then you look at our public speaking pedagogy, you look at who directs public speaking programs, and you look at research faculty who regularly call public speaking “punishment” and think of it as a waste of time. We are our biggest obstacle in this.