The New York Sophist

I just read Steven Salaita’s new blog where he writes a very nice, very long piece about his new job as a school bus driver in the Washington D.C. area. It’s really good, really well written. But it’s not good rhetoric.

Salaita describes being a school bus driver in very noble terms, anchoring his description on the terrible alternative, being a university professor, and having to compromise one’s views. He describes not being able to hold his position at the American University in Beirut because he refused to compromise with the provost on a matter of campus dissent about his loss of his position. It seems, from the way Salaita tells it, that he could have held onto a position there if he had worked to quiet the student unrest. He refused to do it.

At the same time, he is very flexible and fluid and generous about finding the values in being a school bus driver. I’m sure it’s a fine job for those who need to do it. But Salaita could have done so much more if he was a bit more flexible in the way he presents his viewpoints.

Consider the idea that he could have helped those protesting students find more productive, and more acceptable ways to vent their frustration, anger, and concern about his loss of appointment. He might have been able to stay at AUB and teach and write. He would have been able to reach a great many students there, expressing to them his principles, the backing for them, and reasons why they should oppose colonization. But as a school bus driver he no longer has that opportunity.

It seems to go without saying that Salaita’s downfall is his lack of understanding when it comes to rhetoric. For him, rhetoric is always fake, always a gut-wrenching compromise, always opposed to the truth in service of the bad. Here’s a quote from him describing the oldest rhetorical form, that of speaking:

I was rarely nervous speaking in public, even when infamy provided large audiences.  During that period I was fighting for a cause, one indivisible from my career, and so I welcomed opportunities to lecture.  Self-assurance gave way to nervousness after speaking became an occupation.  Like any prestige economy, speechmaking is fraught with ego and betrayal.  It requires self-promotion and networking and assertiveness and all kinds of other things I do poorly.  People in the circuit are cognizant of the approaches and opinions that would limit their desirability and the size of their audiences.  They also understand which demographics to ridicule and which to promote.  Public discourse doesn’t exist in a free market. 

Salaita’s lack of fear of public speaking is truly disturbing. Such lack of concern means a lack of interest in the audience’s role in the crafting of meaning. Salaita is there to merely tell, to impose upon the audience his view. They are to receive it. Since it’s a right view, they will get it, or they won’t, and that will be that. His admission that he does networking poorly is meant to be a dismissal of networking as not something “honest people with conviction” are able to do, but what I get is someone who has little interest in the dynamics of communication, language, and speech. Speechmaking and public discourse don’t fit his model of what it should look like, so they don’t exist. Salaita is a certain person. Certain about a great many things, and it informs this very thin, very strange model of giving talks.

Consider an alternative, where one’s fidelity to one’s political positions encourages one to find ways of reaching audiences that, through legitimate means very much like your own, have arrived at certain conclusions. Imagine these people’s conclusions being the product of reading, thinking, living, and talking. This is how you arrived at yours. Now imagine that this machine, the human mind, could be driven on another road of such materials, and it could arrive at different conclusions. Imagine that the certainty that language offers is merely one iteration of language’s power, and that doubt and questioning are the other side of that descriptive and dominating function of language.

Sometimes it is very valuable to soften one’s virtues, one’s principles in order to allow access to why they are so good to those who you deem most unlikely to agree. A rigid expression of principled view is often the best way to eliminate any conversation or conversion, and also a good way to make sure that any and all of your attempts at persuasion are shut down (the so-called “blacklist” he mentions in the post). There has to be some flexibility in how one proposes and presents ideas to audiences. If that flexibility is not there, then we should seriously doubt the authenticity of the claim of the person that they really do want to convince people of their view. Most of the time, such as in this case, we see that the correct view is merely correct, and exposure to it should render people eager to change minds.

The idea of “honest work” is a good one, but who gets to determine that? From this post, it seems that the “honest work” of driving the school bus is that because it is extremely removed from being a professor or scholar. The distance between absolutes is not honest, but constructed. To talk about the constructed nature of scholarship, professor labor, the academy, and the blue-collar world is very interesting and could open up a great discussion. But here we have simple contrast bordering on contradiction. “this is honest because it is the opposite of that.” I think from his blog we will get a nice clinic in the importance and difficulty of the art of rhetoric.

It’s not easy to try to approach others with ideas; it is exceedingly difficult to get someone to see things from your perspective; it is nearly impossible to get agreement on a contentious issue with others. But the art of rhetoric, being flexible with the presentation of firm commitment, opening or even unlocking the door to how that commitment was formed, is essential even in its difficulty. For at the end, our presentation out loud of our commitments for the ears and mind of others turns us into an other for our own ideas, and gives us much needed refinement of those thoughts for the furthering of the argument, idea, or belief. We might not be able to convince others of our viewpoints in a frame of total agreement. But we might all end up with something new to consider, to think about, and to evaluate that comes from the no-one, from the act of rhetorical engagement itself. This is what is missing from the discourse of Salaita, and all those who fear adjusting the presentation of their ideas is total betrayal of those ideas. Good rhetoric requires it.

Surfing around this morning and discovered that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Measure of a Man” has it’s 30th anniversary today! I feel pretty old.

Here’s a great article talking about the history of the episode and its production.

In this episode, Starfleet has a hearing to determine if Data has rights. He’s about to be considered the property of Starfleet so a robotics expert can disassemble him and build more Datas to serve on the entire fleet.

Data decides to resign from Starfleet to avoid being disassembled as he doesn’t feel the robotics expert will be competent enough to reassemble him.

This sparks a hearing where an admiral appoints Riker to advocate for Starfleet against Data. Picard advocates for Data. I guess Starfleet doesn’t have JAGS? Or maybe everyone has a legal education in Starfleet?

Anyway, this episode I used for years upon years in argumentation courses. Watching the way the arguments are made, the way evidence is presented, and how the two characters try to persuade the judge is burned into my memory. It was a fun time. I even used it here at St. John’s for a few years, but haven’t done so in a long time.

The episode is good to show to students as it’s very disconnected from the familiar. Many of them haven’t seen much of Star Trek of any kind, and the topic – whether an artificial intelligence has rights – is one that seems somewhat fantastical, which is good for pushing creativity among students (they don’t get much of a chance for it at any point in schooling).

It might be time to show this episode again in class as this is the generation that will have to face this question for real: Does an artificial intelligence enjoy the same rights to self-determination and choice as a human being would?

I’m wary of using entertainment media to teach these concepts, but this premise is one where we can really mine out some “equipment for living” in Burke’s phrasing. The question is still an open one even given the entire argument of both sides. Students can use it to generate their own arguments about the issue and bring up conceptions of the case that did not appear in the episode.

Maybe I should return to this in the classroom and see what happens.

P.S. I rewatched this episode a couple of days after i posted this, and the reason there are no JAGs is the starbase is new, and nobody has been assigned to the office yet there. This is the reason why the officers of the Enterprise must serve as the advocates.

I used to use Microsoft OneNote a ton to take notes and save clips of things, but since I now am using my new Pixelbook more and more (it’s what I’m typing on now) for everyday tasks, Google Keep is my go to for saving stuff I want to write about or think about later on.

It’s so strange. Google Keep is far too simple. It’s a web based clipper of URLS, images, and lists. It doesn’t have nearly the features of OneNote, but it’s so quick and easy to use I just keep clicking on it to save stuff. Plus on a chromebook you are imbedded in the web anyway, so I think that makes me perceive that things are going faster.

Also I just take notes now in Google Docs and it’s helping me remember stuff a lot better, and create a lot more. I think that I’ve reached a point where direct and simple are more important than a bunch of features that I might use someday. OneNote is still amazing, but for some reason I just don’t really go back to it and poke around. When I feel like I want to do some writing that’s not connected to a project that I’m already into, I just open keep and poke around.

Of course I have many notebooks – drawers and drawers of them – which is my preferred way to write when in transit. Now the pixelbook’s big advantage is that it fits perfectly and comfortably on the tray of an airplane seat. It’s quite literally the best airplane computer I’ve ever seen, even better than an iPad with a keyboard case. I’ve tried everything, and this one is super great. It doesn’t feel like you are going to break the tray either. It just works perfectly and feels comfortable.

But if you don’t want to have the tray out, the notebook does fine. I always have a Muji pen or a uniball pen as those are cheap, but they move fast, they seem to not mush up your thoughts or reactions as you go, like slower pens will do. The best way to test out what you’d like to write with or on is to subscribe to ScribeDelivery which is a blind-box for notebooks and pens. I’ve learned a lot about my analog writing desires and process from them. And here in New York, being on a bus or a subway always gets me thinking about writing, so I want to have something to jot things down on.

I don’t like tiny notebooks; I really don’t have a lot of hates, but I really do hate the smallest Moleskine notebooks. They are just so rigid and bulky and the pages never sit right when you try to use them on the go. This is my current notebook that I bought in Japan at a museum gift shop. It’s perfect, plus it has that great Japanese paper, not sure what it’s called, but it has a great feeling and the ink doesn’t bleed off of it. I got another one after I opened the one I bought and tried it out so I wouldn’t run out. It’s doing pretty well so far, mostly because Google Keep is slowly encroaching on my paper notebook habits.

Keep is great for taking pictures of books and book reviews so I know what to read next. I’ve found myself slipping into the habit of taking pictures of paragraphs – something I’ve seen students do on social media – instead of writing the quote out or typing it out. I wonder how this experience with note taking changes the relationship we’d have with the note. Is it better to write it out? I have notebooks full of paragraphs I wrote out in the library because I didn’t have a laptop, or my laptop’s battery was so bad that it would not be possible to sit there with it for hours pouring over books. But the pixelbook regularly will go 8 to 10 hours without the charger. I’m just typing after all, nothing very battery intensive. But these devices seem to have the technology to where we could type out quotes and notes fairly easily. I wonder why I take photos more often then? Keep is becoming my go-to place for keeping lists of books to buy is part of it too. Easier than the old notebooks.

Yet still this semester I stopped using Google Calendar so much and have a Moleskine planner, which I love filling up with tasks. Perhaps this is all a big, slowly moving circle or something where things trade off with one another based on what I’m thinking and feeling. Or maybe there’s a process underneath that determines it based on what I’m writing about or working on.

The movie Bird Box got a ton of attention over December and I happened to watch it as well. I thought about it for a while after I saw it and decided to try to write a paper about its connection to the contemporary political situation and how we think about rhetoric.

I gave this paper as a talk during our brown bag series that the rhetoric & communication department do every semester. I think it went pretty well.

After the failure of the GoPro 7 to record less than 15 minutes in any one go, I decided to use the old handycam again. So this was shot on a now 12 year old Handycam with a wide angle lens and a zoom mic. It turned out pretty good I think considering the age of everything involved.

I usually use Wondershare Filmora to edit my videos, but it kept crashing, so I used Cyberlink Power Director 14 instead, which was great. It crashed a lot too, so I had to use my laptop to render it but it was super fast once I got all the video transferred over. The Handycam uses this weird compression format called AVCHD which takes some special effort on the part of the editing software to decode.Glad I got it figured out as this is a nice camera (and my only option really) for recording my more long-form stuff I do.

Public speaking, the class everyone must take at University (with a few exceptions such as being at an Ivy League, or being in a very professional-oriented degree) is my new life. It looks like for the foreseeable future it’s all I’ll teach. This is good as it’s all I pretty much want to teach. There are a lot of possibilities within this class, it’s status as a requirement, and its status as a core-curriculum “sacred cow” that makes it interesting. I really can’t believe how little this class has been used to empower speech, rhetoric, and communication departments in the U.S.

Instructors aren’t connecting the dots very well. It wasn’t that long ago that composition was a very small, very ignored corner of the English department, where literature was king, and writing just to study writing was so low that even the MFA program was seen as more legitimate. Now it’s impossible to imagine a campus without a writing center, writing in the disciplines, writing across the curriculum, etc. Now it’s amazing every time I hear a University official talk about how everyone has a responsibility to teach writing.

The same should be true of speech, but we teach only simple modality in our courses. Public speaking textbooks exist, which is a huge problem. There are so many amazing things to read about, study, and present about that there really shouldn’t be a need for a public speaking book. Teaching people form of public address is to miss the wonderful opportunity to get them interested and motivated to read good works about ideas and topics they really love.

That research benefit goes with a confidence benefit in the art of presentation, particularly because they have a stake in whatever it is that they are speaking about instead of it being randomly assigned by some instructor, or some topic that is “reserved” for class speeches. Speaking centers would be a great addition to writing centers as places where students could get assistance and help developing what they’d like to say instead of being graded on whether they can “find the thesis” of a speech.

The absolute poverty of what we teach was revealed to be very starkly last week during an assessment meeting, where the pre-test to be given to students had them locate a thesis statement. How is this helpful? How does this help them come up with what to say to convince others that they are right? How does this help a person marshall the right words when the stakes are high and the disagreement is everywhere?

Assessment might be impossible for public speaking in a way that satisfies the Dean’s office bureaucrats who want the right form filled out the right way in the right folder so they can go home at the right time. A performance assessment might be better for public speaking, just to see if we can see the attempt to connect to audience, establish a position, and show the audience that this position is a reasonable, if not the best position, to take on a question.

I’m very worried that students don’t know how to do this, and are instead learning a “courtly” rhetoric, where they learn how to follow the rules to say something that pleases power. As Sacvan Bercovitch pointed out years ago, American society even agrees on what dissent should look like. There’s a cultural practice of consensual dissent defining what it means to be recognizably against. Awareness of this, and the awareness of engagement in structures of power distribution, or awareness of human motives and how they are accounted, seems essential and at the very least, more valuable than rule-following for the construction of messages. Following the expected rules of a speech is one thing, but following them in order to gain adherence from an audience is quite another.

To this end, I’ve started playing around with various controversiae and declamation topics from Rome, updating them to suit the modern day. I tried this out on Friday, and it went pretty well. What was most interesting about it was that the class I have that is younger students, mostly first or second year in college, were very much into it and very excited about doing it. The other class with mostly juniors and seniors was not into it at all, and seemed to resent my disruption of their passive existence in the classroom. It might sound like I’m blaming them here, but I feel that this is a survival strategy that comes from having numerous professors who just want attention and a space to talk rather than a space to engage with others in practice.

The Ancient Roman curriculum recognized the need for practice to happen to get a grip on how and why commonplaces worked (or didn’t). To theorize in action the audience reacting to an appeal as it unfolds over time (praxis, in rhetoric at least). And to indicate the existence of perspective and ideology in every account we can give of a situation and the need to judge/move/or act on it (narrative). These are three things that I think could be assessed through performance, but again, this is something that would be too difficult to do since assessment is more of a “I’m doing my job” thing rather than an authentic exploration of what students are becoming through study.

More posts to come about my declamation experiment – I’m always thinking about and composing them which is super weird, but it’s a good time. I think that the crafting of these declamation exercises is really good for the mind, which is why I like to work on them anytime my mind drifts. Creating the possibilities of rhetorical response is also rhetorical, and very healthy as it reminds us that there are numerous ways to be within society and the world. We don’t have a grasp of that at all, but we do like to universalize our own experiences. Public speaking is the art of keeping that from happening by showing how powerful and attractive it is to be trapped hopelessly in perspective, but a perspective that makes politics possible.