The New York Sophist

Discussing the so-called “intellectual dark web” with a friend of mine and the phrase really struck me as odd. This title, this identity communicates a lot about the desire of the identity of these thinkers and speakers and not much of the political position or the policies they would support.

Anyway, I love this video a friend sent me as in this clip Jordan Peterson suggests the best way to engage with leftist ideas is unavailable to them. They don’t know anyone who authentically holds a left leaning view across the board, and is able to engage them on the level and the way they like to develop their rhetoric.

Is this a gesture toward switch side debate? I think it might be much more than a gesture. I think Peterson is saying that they need to find someone who would agree to represent the views they are against in a panel format. This is similar to the suggestion made by David Bohm in his book On Dialogue where if nobody believes the opposing viewpoint, people should be assigned to represent it fairly, or as best as they can.

Switch-side debating was not created because of its educational value, but because it solved a big problem in number of people who could debate at a tournament. As the tournament model of debate eradicated all other avenues for debating, allowing colleges to enter one, or possibly two affirmative and negative teams became too few. If teams were disconnected from permanent advocacy it made it much easier to expand the tournament to accommodate the demand for participation.

The educational value of switch-side debate arose as a discourse of justification for this competitive choice. It was a very well thought out, strategic response to the tradition of debate education which had been based on an ethic of accepting student position on a debate topic as legitimate. That is, no debate instructor would encourage or force a student to take a position against what he or she walked into the club believing. This history can be examined by reading Darren Hicks and Ronald Greene’s excellent essay about it.

The arguments in favor of switch-side might have risen out of a bureaucratic need and desire to have more weekend competition speakers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the claims in favor of switch-side should be dismissed out of hand. On the contrary, there are a lot of really great reasons to make someone study argumentation this way, most notably for me the idea that it puts debate and argument in the subjective driver’s seat, making the student the object of study. In this way, debate study using switch-side makes debate similar to the study of spiritual identity and the relationship of being to the wider world, like the study of the koan in Zen Buddhism. Of course, this defense is my own and not represented in the more traditional defenses, but many of those are good because they too push an ethic that it is important to de-center students’ ideas and beliefs in order to stimulate more reading, thinking, and discussion about ideas.

Peterson’s idea of switch side isn’t meant for this purpose. He very clearly wants to have something for the sharpening of his own arguments, and the arguments of those he’s in conversation with in the video. It cannot be denied that switch-side can be used to close off, intensify, and make a set of commitments appear even better. It can be practice for a political project of some kind as opposed to using its power to remind us that our perspective is always limited.

It is this use of switch-side that requires that switch-side debate practices don’t forget that they are meant to represent alternative viewpoints on topics, not just an opposition to whatever is brought up by the affirmative side. There should be something beyond mere fidelity to argument. In Peterson’s model, at least the way he discusses it here in this short clip, his fidelity is to the argument as a thing, as something that has a “final form” or “best form” that can be recognized. This can be done rhetorically with the use of the universal audience, which I don’t think is ever far from their minds. Concern with how the audience reacts to and engages with these arguments is much more important to quality than any fidelity to argument as a closed system. The difference is whether or not your purpose in arguing is to be right or to be convincing. Obviously, everyone would like to be both. But to be both requires recognition by those to whom you are presenting your ideas. You must convey rightness in recognizable standards. Which is why using switch-side practices to refine an argument on its own terms, or in some absolute terms, will never be able to do that.

Instead, switch-side is at its best when it is allowed to threaten you with decentering your beliefs and making you think again about the support for them. Without the element of real threat, or real fear that one’s ideas could appear unsupported, the pedagogy doesn’t work. This is also why an audience is necessary, and one that is approached in the terms of the universal audience – without resorting to inside appeals that only a vanguard would understand.

Also, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a wealth of literature easily accessible to people who want to engage ideas discussing switch-side debate and other rhetorical practices, such as declamation, that can not only help one articulate one’s beliefs, but form the beliefs themselves. This aspect of rhetorical education is always present and often ignored, mostly to our peril. We are being shaped, and shaping others, through something we treat as throw-away style or transmission. It’s not just a “fun” thing to do, it’s a dangerously transformative practice. I guess it’s fun in the way that playing with chemicals in a chemistry lab is fun. But respect for what one is handling is paramount.

What can we do as rhetoric scholars to create a wealth of information about the practice of the oral expression of arguments for the purpose of intellectual investigation or critical inquiry? Where are the public intellectuals of the art of practicing how one says something as a method to determine what one is going to say? And more so, speaking out your ideas as a way of crafting and creating them? When are we really going to take this mantle on? When are we going to take responsibility for our scholarship and its incredible importance for the creation of thought, belief, and attitude among millions around the world?

books by Professor Lionel Crocker, Ph.D.

There was a time when professors of speech were proud to be called professors of speech and wrote a dizzying array of analytical texts, dancing the rhetorical line of textbook and study. What happened?

Professors of speech were proud to teach students about orators and oration, and proud to encourage them to speak up and out, to give oral presentations in class. Now it seems mostly what we do is grade poorly written papers of half-assed explanations of French critical theory. It’s half-assed, because it’s borrowed. It’s not ours. We are embarrassed of what we own, we want to pretend it’s not ours. We want to own something cooler. We are anxious about being “mere” speech teachers.

I really miss The Journal of the American Forensic Association because it was an example of what we aspired to be and what we gave up on. I don’t have actual nostalgia because I’m not old enough to have professionally interacted with the journal before it was transformed into the much cooler, but not quite French Argumentation and Advocacy. The shift in content is palpable if you look through the legacy of JAFA. Gone are the concerned pieces about doing right by students. Present are a lot of essays that claim to have “figured out what really happened” in a public controversy that is over 3 or 4 years old. I prefer and miss the accounting of teaching, the concerns about obligations, ethical and otherwise toward students who are speaking and creating rhetoric, and the concern about evaluation and assessment. I don’t think that A&A, or any of our communication journals are terribly interested in these conversations. Sometimes it’s unclear to me what the Taylor and Francis journals are, except file folders for academic essays. Who goes through and reads one particular journal over another one?

I accidentally discovered Lionel Crocker and his work and it’s like a breath of fresh air, sort of like the Druidian canned air in the film Spaceballs. Crocker was a “generalists generalist” and lost nothing from it. He taught public speaking, a very problematic class worth talking about called “The Great Orators” (that would be fun to see that syllabus today), Debate and Argumentation (the way I prefer it phrased anyway) as well as other courses on politics and speech. He also regularly gave speeches himself and some were published in Vital Speeches of the Day. He was also listed in Who’s Who in the United States several times. He felt confident and comfortable teaching 7 classes and then spending the afternoon writing about whatever he felt he wanted to share scholarly opinion on.

How do we get back to this? Hyper-specialization has made us concerned about the material ownership of our teaching and research, and has made us wary of sharing ideas with others in an accessible way. Our tenure and promotion standards are based on the question, “How few people can understand your work?” And teaching is considered to be a grueling labor that one must tolerate in order to do the real work: publishing some esoteric thing in a very expensive, very pay-walled journal that many people will never see. We should question why we feel such anxiety about where we are, what we study, and why we wish it were something other than what it is. I’m not suggesting everyone abandon their research agendas. Far from it. I’m suggesting that there is an old abandoned mode of performing “rhetoric professor” that should be recovered, explored, tested, discussed, and possibly adapted for performance. Don’t young people today call this a ‘reboot’?

Concerning ourselves with the public and shared nature of oratory, concerning ourselves with the American, oratorical tradition of public speaking and public address, concerning ourselves with this as a dangerous and influential set of powerful and revolutionary ideas (which is why looking at the Great Orators course syllabus would be a class in itself on modes of exclusionary politics), thinking about rhetoric as a daily practiced lived thing among all people who argue and think and engage one another regularly is what we should turn our attention toward, scholarly and pedagogically, and realize that what we own, what our tradition is, and what we are able to teach is nothing short of subversive. In the physics lab they do not let the students actually construct nuclear bombs. If they only knew what we hand over for practice in our courses.

A few years ago I thought about writing about another of these highly influential, highly thoughtful generalists of our field who are forgotten (or ignored?) Arthur Kreuger. There are a ton of these people who should still be thought about, and potentially emulated in some respects , most notably people who want to engage the world around them with scholarship and pedagogy instead of a few hundred people who “get it.” I get so much out of looking at what they did, but I wonder what the research agenda looks like? At the last Tokyo Argumentation Conference, David Zarefsky gave a presentation on Douglas Ehninger, another of these generalist types, and how and why his research matters, or speaks to us today. Many of you know I love Ehninger, but his legacy is hardly one that needs recovery.

Who else out there do I not know about? Who might I bump into next? I can’t remember where I found out about Crocker, but I think this sort of approach to rhetoric is one that we are missing and would really, really benefit from in ways that we have forgotten about.

The scientific metaphor is dangerous. We get it all the time though, so it’s something we don’t pay much attention to. But the scientific metaphor of knowledge isn’t going to work unless you have some stable quantities at some point in the operation. So a debate laboratory seems like a bad metaphor, the sort I would critique here. Stabilizing debate, however it’s done, adds elements of artificiality into the process that trade off with pedagogical value. For example, stable notions of what arguments “beat” other arguments give a sense of debate practice that just does not hold up in front of audiences, but it sure makes tournaments possible.

So to call a debate conference a laboratory really surprised me. Earlier this month, I attended the debate laboratory at the University of Padua in Italy, arranged by Professor Adelino Cattani. Here the stable element was the most obvious one: What is best for the student?

The invited speakers at the 2018 University of Padua Debate laboratory.

This “best” needs some definition. Throughout the papers I heard there was a concern that debate was meant for other purposes than determining who had the best arguments or who was the best debater. Most debate practice, as demonstrated by the speakers, is aimed at improving student rhetorical ability – that is how to prepare reason, evidence, and argument for oral delivery in front of an audience where you will have live critique by an advocate for the other side at the same time.

Here are the big take-aways from the Padua conference:

1. There is great value in having isolated pockets of debate practice that are internally focused. A break from my previous views so it seems. Not exactly: These practices are absent a tournament circuit where there’s a number of set, “important” tournaments to attend, and the only goal is the competition that you are having right then. It seems that keeping debate practices localized and isolated from a large competitive circuit allows you to focus on student education and to be able to assess it outside of victories. One of the best examples of the poverty of intercollegiate debate education is the lack of any other metric than tournament success to determine if debate is teaching.

2. Focus on one element of debating practice can be intellectually rich. I was very curious what other people would talk about in Padua because the theme of the conference was judging. Can we create a good judging sheet that everyone can agree upon? I thought it was a strange topic, but I thought of an idea and wrote down some ideas I hoped were good. It turns out that this sort of focus allows for deeper and more sustained thought about a practice, one percentage of the total practice of debate that then becomes a symbol of the larger ideology operating within debating no matter how it is practiced.

3. Better debate is happening outside of – not in spite of – the obvious locations. Travelling to Padua and hearing about debate in South America, France, Spain, and Italy really made me realize not only how possible, but how good it is to look for debate happening as part of curricula, part of a way of assessment and evaluation in university and other places of learning. All of debate’s negative characteristics stem from the idea that debate is meant for a competition that will recognize a winner. Attending this laboratory gave me faith in the project of practicing debate intellectually, as a teacher, and not as some sport coach trying to design plays that win prizes. One refreshing element was no discussion of what winners get or how to create a fair debate, as opposed to a debate conference I went to in the spring where over an hour of a two-day meeting was spent discussing the question “What prizes should they win?” It was very refreshing to find a community that is motivated more by the question, “Are we doing right by our students in how we judge their debates?”

So far this is what I’m reflecting on. There was a time when actual teachers ran debate programs in America, and were concerned about what was happening to their students and how debate was influencing and moving their thought and reading. Today most American students’ experience in debate is a very shallow one, motivated by beating others, winning awards, and creating argument “plays” that cannot be defended against. Far away from the study of how to motivate audiences, we have intercollegiate debate that renders thought into awe and conversation into silence in the presence of the definite master of argument. Perhaps a one-day conference on the question of one argument strategy, speaker points, or judging would benefit American practices as well, by allowing us a concrete and stable place from which we can reveal some of the trappings of ideology and whether we really want them in our art.

This trip to Italy has been great if unexpected. Just goes to show you that you should reach out to any random academic emails you get if you think that the person on the other end shares your ideas or area even a little bit. I speak tomorrow at the University of Padua as a part of a conference interrogating the idea of judging sheets, rubrics, or as we call them in the U.S. “ballots.” It’s such a cute American name for what is essentially a rubric but we love to keep that democratic exceptionalism dream alive don’t we?

I am super curious how the event will go. I’ve prepared my remarks, about 8 pages worth, that I’ll post on academia.edu after the conference concludes. I hope I did it “right.” You never know what people might expect at a European conference. Sometimes you really hit a nerve, sometimes everyone shrugs, sometimes they get really excited about your perspective. Mostly I’ve gotten option 3 out of that list because I think the combination of the American rhetorical tradition along with concern for student production is really engaging for people who feel that more can and should be done with students in the curriculum. I think it’s one of the best connections between American academics and Europeans.

I think that most of the other speakers will be tournament-oriented, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the tournament, per se. The concern is of course “teaching to the test” where the subversive nature of debate education is stripped away by desire to conform to the ballot for the pleasure of winning, or what Starhawk might call power-over others. The trick is to make debate events that focus us on her idea of power-with or power-through (not sure if that’s her idea, but I thought about it through her work so if not, it might as well be her’s).

For those who are interested, here’s my Trip to Italy Photo Album in Progress. I’ll update photos probably for the last time on the 9th after getting back to the U.S. This is everything from the past 24 hours so far anyway, and it will update as I upload. Trying to get away from Facebook as much as I can, and when the tools are as good as Google Photos and Squarespace, it’s super easy to do.

More on the conference after it happens. This is a reflection post and I’ve turned it into pre-gaming a conference.

I was in Venice yesterday and had a bittersweet moment and wanted to talk about it. I really like the connections between places that you visit more than once in your life. Here goes!

Hooray for the GoPro, the best blogging/vlogging device I own.

I wonder if I really am done with debate, or will debate continue to use me, or in Lacan’s words “Spin me like a top” in pursuit of it’s own pleasure, with me playing the role of the disciplinary psychotic?

The author of this blog in St. Mark’s Square, November 2004.

Have I done a good job with debate over the last 14 years? There’s nothing tangible, no rewards from the University, no support that I really needed, no clear legal protections for what I was doing (travelling with students all over), no assistance from parts of the university that you’d think would be available for assistance, and the list goes on. I am glad to be done with it for sure. But I’m also glad to have done it. Everything that’s happened since 2004 I couldn’t have possibly imagined, and whether it’s good or bad, successful or not, I’m very grateful for all the experiences that happened between my first visit to St. Mark’s Square and this recent one. It has been a good time, good meaning that even the negative moments are good in the fact that they were bad; all things lead us to some sort of critical reflection if we try.

What will have happened between this visit and the next? If past is prologue, expect that video around 2032.

Debate continues to interest me but not in the more traditional capacities. Here’s to hoping tomorrow is a Burkean mystic’s “peek around the corner.”

For those of you who know me, or read the blog regularly, you know of my deep and abiding love for Chromebooks.

There has always been deep desire, really deep passion and attraction to one Chromebook above all the others, which is the Google premium Chromebook, now called the Pixelbook. It’s a Chrome OS device, but has a build like a mac book. It’s also a thousand US dollars. Who would pay that for a Chrome OS computer?

Well I have always wanted to, but felt like the price was well above what I could afford for a laptop (or what was appropriate to spend). Then there was Black Friday. $300 off the price. I had to do it. When would it be that cheap again?

Nevermind the fact that I’m surrounded on all sides of my life by computers. I have three chromebooks already, all were under 200 dollars, and two Windows machines – my 4k video editing and gaming laptop, and my University supplied Lenovo which is like a boxy sedan. I also have a tower I built that runs great, and another PC that I keep up at the University as our computer support person can’t figure out how to hook up the computers we ordered for that room. So if we want to have a video chat or whatever, we rely on the computer I supply. I know it’s ridiculous, but that’s the reality of where i work. Computer addiction isn’t a thing. It could be worse, I could be addicted to buying and messing around with cars. That would be really expensive and a big problem in a city where having one garage slot is often the same price as rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the rest of the country.

I can tell you now after using it for a week or so, nothing compares to this laptop. It’s the perfect size, perfect weight, the keyboard is absolutely dreamy for writers like us, and the screen is retina-display worthy. The icing on the cake is the USB C ports, one on each side for whatever you’d like to use them for, and the battery which I regularly get about 8 to 9 hours out of at work. This is playing music, typing a lot (email and writing), and surfing the web doing research, etc. I do not watch a lot of videos on the device nor do I use it often as a tablet.

This little computer just wants me to type on it all the time. It feels great. Also being a Chromebook I don’t have to worry about updates and viruses and stuff like that. The only difference in this one and the other’s that I’ve had is this one can run Android apps which is fantastic but takes some getting used to. I really like the productivity apps I have tried out, and most importantly, MS Word works perfectly. I’m still a Google Docs person at heart and just wish that Zotero would produce something for Google Docs that didn’t require the stand-alone Windows or Mac app.

So the machine met all my expectations and then some. I think it’s my go-to device from now on. I should have gotten it a long time ago and listened to intuition. I think if you are on the fence about it, just get it. It’s an amazing little device for writers, people who do a lot of research and reading online, or if your daily job requires a lot of attention to email. It’s a productivity beast.