The New York Sophist

Good morning!

here’s the sunrise we’ve been getting in Queens the last few weeks. It’s been really great, and I post this today because we have nothing but grey skies and cold rain today. At least I have no plans in going outside.

Stayed up late tweaking and finishing my lecture for Italy this week. I have been invited to speak about debate judging and debate evaluation at the University of Padua and I feel ready for that. A couple of more slides today and I should be set. I didn’t think I would do any more travelling for debate after the spring, but here we are.

One of the reasons I get these opportunities is the bad attitude toward debate as an academic subject shared by debate coaches and rhetoric scholars alike. Both are happy to hang onto the rhetoric of sport surrounding debate: It suits faculty who have no interest in teaching debate as a productive art, and it suits coaches under a rubric of specialization, to keep hold of this one thing that only they can do and nobody in their department, let alone the college, can do. This attitude harms the advancement of debate, making it responsive rather than generative of advances. Like American football, it will only change the rules or the play of the game if there’s a dire need, like a consistent injury that happens from playing. As we have seen, even that isn’t enough to change the fundamentals of the play.

Debate can’t cause this sort of harm, can it? Nothing physiological like that, but it sure can encourage people to avoid discourse and speaking where they need to be. Debate-as-sport encourages participants to view themselves as doing debate “the right way” or at another level, therefore always thinking of public engagement with debate as something beneath them. This doesn’t mean they won’t be political – debate students love activism, marching around at protests, shouting down speakers on campuses, etc. The question is: Is this the political we want to encourage? Is this the political we want to have? From the point of view of rhetoric, this political is a default, one with very little rhetorical perspective or training. From my point of view, it’s hardly sophistic. There’s nothing sophisticated about marching around in total opposition to something without a strategy of how you are going to reach unconvinced, or alternatively-convinced minds.

In treating the practice of debate as seriously as we treat chemistry, biology, or literature we get access to a forward-thinking model and practice of debate, one that can be generative of new ways to approach the issues we face. We can get ahead of ourselves and think about the normative rather than the responsive. We can construct a practice that would work well with scholarship and the university as a whole. There’s a lot to be said for attention this way. And there seems to be a community out there – disconnected from the tournament-addicted crew – interested in having this conversation.

Not sure what to expect, but since it’s the last week of class I have a lot to do to get ready to be gone for 4 days. I think my students appreciate it, although a big concern I have is with missing class as I get older. I want almost everything I do to have classroom implications, I want all the things I study and think about to be directly beneficial to the students enrolled in my courses. I want the cost and the structure of the university not to be something that I work with as a launchpad, or a springboard, or the start of a tangent, but to be immersed or meshed together. The university is an ancient machine for the generation of powerful scholarship, and it’s based on students attending, paying, and feeling like a part of it. My attention to those students is essential for my scholarship to matter.

Thanksgiving was spent in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn where 18 people sat down at the same table and enjoyed a huge amount of amazing food that was prepared by a variety of those same folks.

It was really impressive to me. I had a great time talking to people who had all sorts of lives: There were a number of actors there, given that’s probably how most of them know one another. But I talked to freelance writers, photographers, and a number of other folks who I’m not sure what they do, but they weren’t academics, which is a big change for me. It’s also a big change to enjoy a holiday without the constant reminder that the next weekend you will be travelling to another competition.

Here’s the table in all it’s glory:

This semester has gone by way too quickly. I have been enjoying myself much more than I ever have at St. John’s. It feels like a new job to me. There’s always trouble, but I’m thankful that I’m no longer so stressed out all the time. I actually have time to work on my classes, to meet with students and give high-quality feedback, to read and write, and most importantly to think.

I thought about all the Thanksgivings I missed in the name of some higher calling or higher purpose in teaching debate. What a waste compared to time for introspection, and reflection. We are nothing if not reiterations of ourselves, and without time to think about that we are just bad copies. I feel this semester was one of the first times as a faculty member I really had opportunity to think about myself with myself and root my thoughts into particular, clear scholarship and teaching objectives. I hope it turns out as fruitful as the thinking was. It takes a while to get your bearings when you cut out a large part of your daily life very suddenly.

Now it’s December 1st, and the time between this day and the one pictured above feels like it never happened. The closing of the semester is always an acceleration toward speed, it feels like. I am very pleased with the speeches my students have made this term, but there’s still a lot missing. Next semester I’ll try again. Reiteration.

It’s morning of day 2 of the National Communication Association annual convention, and I’m happy to be here. I didn’t do much yesterday except the thing that I think NCA is about – catching up with people who you know, who you care about, who interest you and you them, and seeing old friends and students. It’s really wonderful. I think I’m one of the few people who is happy to take the negatives of NCA (size, scope, politics, performance pressure, etc) due to the really wonderful moments it affords and the freedom to speak primarily as members of a scholarly discipline.  

I’m also glad I was wrong about the mid-term elections and the Republicans don’t control everything. But it’s also odd how people still call what happened a “blue wave” and are excited that less-oppressive millionaries are deciding how to fight for their version of bad laws we’re all subjected to. Do you want a really massive military or just a massive one? 

I attended a panel yesterday that just really didn’t click for me. I feel that the best papers tend to push a question rather than a result. Part of the mis-step was trusting in the online scheduling tool which doesn’t really allow for the diviniation that the print book does. There’s something about seeing everything there in print and feeling out the panels in total that is a real advantage over just choosing papers via keyword online.  

Today though I have a bunch of panels selected and the Arnold lecture tonight which is going to be fantastic. Tomorrow I present, and last night I was really too tired to work through my notes and get them down to presentation length. Maybe I can do that today at some point, but it’s a pretty full day.  

I’ve been trying to vlog a bit but there’s not a lot of opportunity and people don’t really like appearing on camera. I’ll try some more today and see how it goes. I’d like to have some good examples of it for the off-chance that I get to teach online public speaking, aka vlogging next term.  

Spent most of today wondering about how Democrat friends are going to handle two pieces of contradictory information coming next week: 1) Voter turnout, particularly among young people, will be at exceptional levels and 2) the Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Naturally, they will find some group of young people who are just so sickeningly lazy and ignorant – how could they not decide to vote! I mean, after all, it’s your entire reason for being!

Since they are going to be hit pretty hard next week I should stop making such fun of them. It is very difficult and very complex to tackle the issue of how to teach and generate support for the following things that would improve American politics: 1) curiosity 2) critical appraisal 3) confident and frequent opinion-sharing with explanations. Luckily being a rhetorician and sophist I think I should teach these things and try to do so with varying degrees of success at the university level and sometimes in the public.

A couple of people today forwarded me this essay in The Baffler which conveyed a very baffled viewpoint on the role and function of debates in society. Debates are scary. This author agrees. They are super scary because they don’t determine who is right or wrong! Oh yes, that’s true I’m afraid. Well then, what’s the point of having debates if they don’t serve absolute knowledge about things?? Well perhaps they just generate more talk about those things and that might be a way of dealing with them? I don’t know, I only teach the stuff.

A lot of frustration with debate is how it never provides a solution or a comfortable and clear right answer at the end of it. Audiences who expect that sort of clarity are often like the kids Marty McFly encounters at the cafe when he arrives in the future and shows them the old video game. “Oh, you have to use your hands?” Sometimes the audience is just way ahead of us in debate world where we are pining on about a fun old technology in a nostalgic way. But seriously though, it doesn’t work if you consider it an ending place instead of a starting place for discourse.

And discourse, from the people all over about issues, is what’s needed to make democratic flavors of government work. You need a number of opinions drifting around and you need creative people creating those opinions. It doesn’t work if people are just obedient to the opinions provided.

Anyway, this is all connected to some of my recent work where I have been puzzling over two phrases: debate-as-argumentation and argumentation-as-debate. Both have a different sensibility and neither are very satisfying. In short, my research indicates that debate is its own rhetorical form, not quite epideictic and not quite argumentation. It’s its own form of rhetoric with a number of different possible functions.

I wrote a letter to the editors of The Baffler. Here it is as I’m not certain if they are going to publish it. See what you think. Debate isn’t what we make it out to be so let’s make it out to be something that it can really do. And what it can do is make more of itself, first and foremost. This is why debate is so profoundly unsatisfying; it offers nothing but more things to talk about. That’s not what debate, conceived as the friendly helper of scientism and the Enlightenment, is supposed to do.