The New York Sophist

I had no idea what to make of the new Taylor Swift video because I am a middle aged white dude who spends a lot of time thinking and talking about video games and books. So this text went right by me. I still really don’t have a handle on what it’s supposed to mean.

More problematic than that is I don’t recognize anyone in this video except for Swift (obviously) and Deadpool and Ellen. I figured it was time to do some research into it to figure out what is happening that I am not getting (or that I’m not supposed to get).

For the first and perhaps only time in my life, Entertainment Tonight taught me something valuable. I never thought I would ever say that. So never say never when it comes to research, reinforced yet again. When people say “evidence-based research” or “evidence-based decision making,” what are they trying to police? Prop up? Reinforce? Exclude? When we teach students about good research we are often merely teaching a replication of a traditional mode of knowing and understanding. We aren’t solving anything most of the time. Entertainment tonight solved some stuff for me and I’m as surprised as I am happy. But I’m sure it will take me months to get a good handle on this text. It’s really not meant for me. But it was a fantastic reminder about what good research is meant to do.

What’s a good source? One that has access you don’t have and presents it in a way you can understand. I don’t expect to learn anything from Entertainment Tonight ever again. But I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong. See you in that future. Never say never.

I showed this video to the argumentation class that I took over for the last 6 weeks. This was shown (well most of it) just after everyone had done some in-class debates.

One of the biggest goals I have in teaching debate and argumentation is to address fact addiction. Students strongly believe that access to facts and repeating what they accessed is all that’s needed to resolve controversies and disagreements. If the other side rejects the facts, you just say them louder. Or you pause the debate for 10 minutes while you go print out the statistics you think will do the job.

Treating poor debate and argument performance not as failure, stupidity, inability, or the like does not help in teaching people how to argue. Treating it like an addiction, and addressing the causes of addiction to facts seems to be the way to go. More on that perhaps in another post, but for now I’ll say that being addicted to facts, like a lot of addictions, is a way to feel comfortable in a world that continuously exposes its contingency. The arbitrary symbol-systems we’ve invented to keep things together are pretty frail, and in a world where students have been taught that there are correct answers to everything, they simply need to be found, and science and math are the ways to find them, they feel pretty powerless against the big contingencies. Facts help them think there’s some bottom and avoid the idea that the elevator has no ground floor.

So I show this video – and the students do not like the IBM Debater. I ask them why.

“She sounds fake,” one student said (Note: If you watch the video you’ll see the IBM team chose a female sounding voice simulation for the AI and indicated that the AI should be called she during the debate).

“She’s just listing a bunch of facts about the issue,” another said.

I said, “Now you know how I feel” – and although I said it as a joke, it resonated with the class. They all paused, as it really sort of opened something up for them.

The conversation continued into a discussion about the other factors (bad pun) needed to do well in debate, and how those factors might be more important than factual information. This was a far cry from the first in-class debate, where most of the students said the debate would have been better if there were “more facts.”

Showing this video after students have tried to do some debates was a really accidentally inspirational teaching move. They saw for themselves what was lacking in their rhetorical performance by watching an AI debater do the same things they did. Although AI is really keen on teaching a system how to debate, what happened here was something akin to the Turing Test – a moment where we learned more about human capabilities than we did about making AI.

One student asked, “Why are they doing this? Having an AI that can debate doesn’t help anyone out at all, what help could it possibly offer?” A great question about the goals of AI, but also answered by the rest of the conversation. We see through AI faults that are hard to pin down; habits that we don’t know we have. I believe this is also a theory of how and why science fiction is so great, it allows us to see something about ourselves or society very clearly by mucking it up with some really unfamiliar context.

Our conversation turned toward this question of why make it – students brought up the Turing test and the belief that debate is a marker of human intelligence. If the AI can debate, then it’s intelligent. I pointed out that since debate is a learned thing, doesn’t that make us artificially intelligent? What part of our intelligence, the way we talk about it, is natural?

I suppose in answer to this question one could turn to the scholarship on argumentation coming from evolutionary psychology and cognitive psychology and say that yes, arguing is a part of natural human communication, but it serves communicative ends (not logic, reason, or rationality). Indeed, those are life-long learning pursuits for everyone as they rely on contingent and unique factors for their judgement and appreciation every time. But debating? That seems very un-natural. Most people use debate and argument as interchangeable terms, but this is a huge mistake that is responsible for a lot of grief out there. Argumentation is a communicative tool whereas debate is an epistemic tool is the best way to put it. But instead we tend toward the model of arguments live inside debates which are ways of determining what’s right or true, or a means of getting people to act in the interests of what’s right and true. Of course there are many problems with this definition namely that people can agree that one side won a debate and go on acting in their lives to the contrary of that decision.

So if AI must be taught how to debate, perhaps we are all AI, there is no “natural” intelligence, and if debating well is a marker of intelligence, that means we must invest the time and energy into creating intelligence among people through schools and all sorts of other programs.

The students came to another conclusion in the light of the Turing Test and now this – that it is more and more impossible to determine what makes a human qualify as human. Instead of hosting the debate for AI to attend and learn, we all realize we are late to the party instead. We are all learning, and intelligence, like it’s harbinger debate, is something we have to practice and work on together all the time.

Argumentation’s role is as a facilitator of communication whereas debate’s role is a check back on argumentation’s power, making sure that we realize the contingency of our knowledge. This is the approach I’m taking toward theory now when teaching the debate or argumentation course. Pretty good result from watching what was a proof of concept debate hosted by IBM.

After this week it seems clear that it’s time for a reboot of the National Communication Association.

I’ve been attending the National Communication Association conference and looking at the journals from it since 2002 when I started graduate studies in rhetoric. Since then, I’ve found the NCA convention to be incredibly valuable. I find it a great time to share ideas, learn, and talk casually with others about issues we face as teachers and professors, as members of academic and university structures, and so on.

NCA is structured to look at itself, to look back. Consider all the Distinguished Scholars and others who signed onto a letter that fallaciously posited diversity as a trade-off with excellence in scholarship. There are of course people like Martin Medhurst who probably believe this is more likely the case than not. There are others who believe that diversity is good if it is “checked” by standards of excellence, merit, etc. But there are others who believed they were signing onto a document that asserted their autonomy within an organization to decide who gets honors and accolades of that organization.

There is a counter-letter, one that points out the flaws of the response of Medhurst and the Distinguished Scholars. The letter that has been signed now by hundreds of members, and perhaps thousands by the time you read this is found here if you want to sign it. It addresses in a serious and meaningful way the issues this controversy brings up. But it doesn’t address the fundamental problem with NCA – that it is about itself more than it is about helping people advance the practice and study of communication. It is about the preservation of the excellence of NCA, and NCA as an organization that is good. It should not be structured like this. Having these elite clubs doesn’t do much to promote an association that should be looking forward, heading off issues, and providing resources to those who need it to advance inquiry.

The aim of NCA should be simple: An association of communication researchers, professionals, and teachers who work together to share ideas, problems, challenges, research, and questions about communication. This communal work should be shared with the public when it can help everyone.

That’s really it. There’s no need for “Distinguished Scholars” or anything that celebrates life-long work toward the organization. As that’s what the work of the Distinguished Scholars is – stuff that gives NCA a reason for being. Praise, awards, and exclusive clubs are not a part of what the association should be about. But having such a group ensures that excellence will never advance, only replicate what came before. The group becomes smaller and more irrelevant over time as the members who would innovate and improve matters leave for organizations that welcome change and opportunity.

NCA sat around for 12 years hoping that diversity would enter the Distinguished Scholars. It never did. The reason is because NCA has structured itself to replicate itself. This is why incremental change won’t improve anything. Although the letter, ideas, and appeals coming from the membership are great. NCA did not try to solve the problem of representation in the Distinguished Scholars by restructuring it or eliminating new members in favor of a differently structured group. It tried to solve it as an organizational problem, as an organization leaning on itself to correct itself.

NCA clearly needs a reboot. It’s saddled with a bunch of nonsense that only gets in the way of the importance of getting teachers, professionals, and scholars together to identify shared issues and interesting ideas. NCA seems to be a place that is designed to give prestige and power to people who already have it. What’s the point of that?

We can get ahead of the Kuhnian critique here, and stop worrying about where we’ve been and what people have done to promote NCA and its journals and such. We can organize NCA to be an association, not an organization, about advancing conversations and encounters that advance communication.

Here are a few ideas.

Titles are for Future Action not a Reward

Any title such as Distinguished Scholar or Teacher should be given to people who show promise, are poised for big moves, and who want to disrupt, innovate, and lead communication (NOT NCA) into needed and new areas and issues. What good is such a title or honor when you are at the end or peak of your career? The association should exist to support those who are members and help them get things out of their research, practice, and teaching in order to improve it. Why reward people who already have it made? Why reward people who are already at the top? That only serves NCA, it doesn’t serve the discipline of communication.

Where are the Distinguished Teachers? Distinguished Practitioners?

There’s no organization like distinguished scholar for teacher or practitioner in NCA. That says a lot. The distinguished scholars’ service to communication is always within NCA’s parameters. This is not the function of an association. This is the function of an organization interested in itself. Change the orientation by expanding what the association honors and respects. These titles will further the hard work already done by members. Nomination should be for potential based on past action, not a wealth of success as it would be in NCA today. Whenever the organization creates titles the conversation should be about how and in what ways these titles advance the practice, teaching, and study of communication. Titles from a national organization can be powerful tools to help those who are doing great work become even greater.

Fund all graduate student attendance to the national convention

There’s nothing quite like the face to face. Eliminate all the self-serving and goofy events. We have a sponsor for the Arnold lecture. Why do we not have a sponsor for graduate student funding? That would be something easy to arrange considering how much money Taylor and Francis and other publishers make off of NCA members in so many ways. NCA never funds new and young people to be a part of it because that doesn’t help preserve the organization. The NCA structure is about repeating the same, replicating the power structure that is. New people with new ideas are disruptive – best to have them pay in so they consider themselves invested and are less likely to criticize. I believe that the association should be about blind spots. What are we missing in the teaching, research, and practice of communication? It’s always new eyes and new perspectives that innovate sets of knowledge. It’s not the older people; they are invested in how things have been done before. We need to invest, quite directly, in new ways to see and do communication.

Engage and interact with publics at the convention site

It would be great to have time, resources, and space dedicated toward articulating and addressing communication issues in the city where the convention is taking place. I don’t mean a symbolic display of the theme of the conference, but something more on the terms of the communities there. NCA could establish relationships with organizations there in that city and see which ones would like time with communication experts (scholarship, practice, and teaching are three different forms of expertise) for the addressing, articulating, and exploration of the issues they face and that we could maybe help with. I don’t mean to say that local communities can’t deal with their own problems, but what a resource for the convention, for our experts, for the local groups, and for the city. It seems strange to not at least let various groups know we’ll be there and they can turn up and participate if they’d like in some brainstorming, spitballing, conversation, or whatever the people in the room would like to do. The advantage of building in an interactive public relation where they are not addressing us and we are not addressing them is that we find a gap in the convention where we are not able to speak to ourselves in that way NCA accidentally encourages. It’s less about NCA and more about the association and what it can and should do with and for others. It probably won’t solve anything, but it gets groups thinking in a different perspective about the work they do, and another perspective is always something useful to have. For NCA, it grounds us back on what should always be the focus: communication.

It’s pretty compelling evidence that NCA has lost sight of advancing thought when a bunch of established, smart, and recognized scholars suddenly backpedal on a letter they signed that was very clear. They are backpedaling because they were invested in NCA as an organization – power, authority, and structure – rather than communication as a site of inquiry. The structure of reward and recognition always gets in the way of what warrants recognition: People asking great questions and keeping them alive for as long as they can lead us to revelation. Diversity is always in the service of inquiry. But it’s not ever in the service of keeping a reward system for past events static and pure. Restructure NCA or we’ll just be revisiting this issue again in a few years.

Check out this excellent piece by Lance Richardson on the difficulties of digging through the hard drives and digital files of Peter Matthiessen. Apparently he had over 39,000 files on one flash drive. As someone who is madly in love with flash drives and someone who admires Peter Matthiessen greatly, this piece could not have made me happier.

Flash drives are so cool. I love the idea of the terminal versus the portable computer, where you move around all your stuff on a device to other computers to work on it. The chromebook is really special to me because of this infatuation with moving around my stuff to different computers. The chromebook is a twist on that, moving the computer around but your stuff stays all in the same place, somewhere in California or Iceland? Who knows.

Several thoughts here – currently people use Google Docs for a lot of writing and it tracks every single change you make and keeps it indefinitely. Freud regularly burned his drafts and discarded papers to keep his idea – psychoanalysis – on track, “pure,” etc. Future Freuds will not have that option. Imagine how different psychoanalysis would be if we had access to all that destroyed stuff. I like the idea because I like the idea of uncertainty as a productive presence but you probably know that by now.

Secondly wouldn’t it be so cool to have a life like Mattheissen’s? Now I don’t know much about his personal life and whether he was horrible to anyone – I’m sure the biography will cover all those aspects when it comes out – but I love the idea of writing away on things that interest you, having an audience for those writings who really likes those things too, and also being involved deeply in Zen and not really having many boundaries or barriers between all these things. I think it would be pretty great to teach and write and think and interact with audiences. I think that last part is the ironic kicker for anyone trained in rhetoric and communication at an R1 these days: No need to think about audience as your audience is always going to be your peers in the field, and also we know better about audience than anyone else, so why reach out? This might explain why people in the field don’t like Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca. Too much reliance on audience, not enough on knowing special things. “Let me tell you all about what audiences want and need,” says the NCA scholar to 5 people in a Hilton hotel ballroom on a Saturday afternoon in November. I think it’s much more within the practice of rhetoric to be addresing as many audiences as you can, whatever that might mean. Maybe all together. Anyway, I have clearly not figured this out yet and probably never will, but I think about it all the time.

Also I do know I overuse that trope, but I just can’t help myself. I love it. Poor NCA. Really taking a beating all the time.

Finally when my grandfather passed away my dad found some drafts on his computer titled something like “autobiography” – there’s some good stuff in there and some insights that follow this paradox: I”m drafting for someone other than myself, so this is meant to be read, but we will never know if this version of the thing is the one meant to be read. Best case scenario: He was thinking about his audience and creating text, but it’s always going to be hovering in this draft-space. Is this Schrodinger’s argument? Both meant for an audience and not meant for an audience at once? The difference is that with digital trails we can look into the cat box whereas physicists cannot. I’m sure they’ll be jealous.

I still use flash drives a lot and now with the announcement that iOS 13 for the iPad Pro will allow you to plug them in, there’s even more options for using them. I should post a picture of my whole collection. Or better yet, a video of them all.

When a veteran rhetorical scholar chooses to make a case you’d expect it to be very difficult to critique, or at least very well constructed, using all of the arts that they study in such a way to make the criticism of it difficult or tricky. But in this case perhaps the mechanisms of gatekeeping are so well embedded in the field that merely pointing at them as obvious goods is enough for those who believe in them.

The recent editorial by Martin Medhurst who edits Rhetoric & Public Affairs (for now) wrote an editorial that I won’t reprint here. It’s been pasted all over rhetoric social media. I can do no better than this critique of Medhurst’s comments by Mohan J. Dutta, so I’m not going to try. If you want to read Medhurst’s post it’s here, and Dutta does an excellent job of indicating the problems with the essay. Suffice it to say that it’s embarrassing that a rhetorician would use such obvious equivocations to make an argument that is purportedly so vital to them. You would think that the argument would be so much better assembled by someone in such a distinguished position.

Two things I will add to the growing critique. First is that it’s no straw person that people believe that strong individual will is all one needs to achieve excellence. Here a scholar with a great record and the power of editing one of the top journals in rhetoric clearly believes that individual accomplishments are the only way to measure excellence, are clearly discernible and measurable, and only those who have these accomplishments enumerated are in a position to determine who else has them. This is disturbing enough. To add to it, it is the graduate committees of what he calls “diverse” scholars who are in the best positions to evaluate their merit and accomplishments. Such certainty is quite good for maintaining systems of power, and absolutely terrible for those interested in advancing communities based on inquiry. Looking back to determine what innovations count is not advisable or healthy. It’s a system that relies on replication in order to determine value. That’s not good for scholarship.

We must recognize the structural and community debts toward and about knowledge and scholarship if we hope to keep advancing thought, which I was under the impression we were supposed to be doing. I believe we need to always be at the ready with argumentative resources about the value of communities that are focused on engaging questions and being critical over the value of the individual genius slaving away in his study (deliberate pronoun choice here, in case you were wondering). This editorial, however narrow-minded it is in its capacity, does do us the valuable service of starkly showing how little critical thinking is employed in determining the slipperiness of terms. “Distinguished” could never be a neutrally arbitrated designation, nor could a place of pure judgement be recovered for such a designation. These things are determined contextually. A rhetorician should know better. We should know better. If we have such designations, they should fully reflect what our ideas teach us. Advancement of thought and scholarship seems to me to be opposed to maintenance of a system of doing scholarship. Diversity of method, diversity of object of study, diversity of scholar, diversity of evaluation – all seem to be givens if one’s aspiration is to advance thinking.

My second thought about this editorial is that it is important to keep the uncertainty about what it means to be distinguished alive and in play. The decision of NCA to open up the process is a good one. This is the right direction, as now we get to ask this question, argue about it, decide what counts and what doesn’t, and most importantly it stays open. An open and direct encounter with the meaning of the term is one of the better ways to prevent the word from being used to curtail the involvement of those who do not have access for historical reasons to the massive resources that most distinguished scholars have had. We, the practitioners of rhetoric, should be engaged on what it means to produce excellent work. It should never be a given – the category itself is value-laden. I think we have ample resources in the field to see how ideology gets us all and how much we need to question and reconsider our judgements and especially our reconsiderations. I do not understand how a flexible and ever-present, ever-rearticulated model of being “distinguished” in scholarship harms the quality of the designation. The consistency comes by the only way rhetoric has remained consistent over time, by adapting itself to the people and places that need and use it to work out meaning. It makes little sense to hold to a hard and fast designation of permanence across time in a field that rightly identifies such beliefs as contingent and historical.

This editorial is nothing short of a gatekeeper pulling off the cover of the machine, showing us the complex and rusty gears, and admonishing us to “be careful with the precious machine! It’s fragile!” Deciding what distinguished means, and who should get that designation, is not a mechanical process and should not be. It should adapt to the ever-changing conditions that we all face in scholarship and in life. This is supposedly the nature of the art we study. Setting up what it means to be distinguished, important, and valuable should be something we all discuss and ask questions about. It goes without saying how weird it is that a rhetorician doesn’t want that discussion.