The New York Sophist

Here’s an attempt at a weekly vlog I’m going to try to put out on Fridays to complement what I post here.

I hope it’s a complement and not something that replaces what I’m writing here, but the temptation is very real.

As someone who studies rhetoric and argumentation from the speech communication tradition, it’s much easier for me to just talk into a camera instead of writing.

I do love writing though. Love doing it, never had a problem with it, and really like the idea of keeping a blog. The trouble is finding a regular time to engage in the practice.

The best fusion of worlds might be in a new podcast I’m about to start producing. More on that to come as it will have it’s own website and all sorts of ways to interact. I’m trying a different platform from the way I did In the Bin.

Let me know what you think of the vlogging experiment! And yes, I need to color correct my footage before posting it. Just realized that.

The headline shouldn’t surprise anyone after checking out what our so-called government thinks is the best way to proceed in making appointment decisions. We elect people who believe that seeing into a person, seeing who they are deep inside, is going to be helpful in determining if they will be able to fulfil a role.

The Kavanaugh hearings exposed that we haven’t moved forward since ancient times in the belief that one’s actions and attitude communicate what’s really in the soul. Spending a few days answering questions in a really fancy room might not be the way to determine if someone is a good person. The process is a parody, a very insulting parody, of dialectic. Kavanaugh is a terrible person for a lot of reasons. So this post isn’t really about him, but it could be as you’ll see near the end.

Kavanaugh is pretty clearly an unfit person to hold any position, but this sort of “unfit” is a perfect fit for the American ruling class. His behaviors throughout his life indicate that he understands what’s on the table and what’s off the table as far as conduct that will be perceived as appropriate, or behavior that matters. Remember, it’s only been recently that we, as a society, have determined that sexual assault is not something that women have to tolerate in order to be successful.

The Kavanaugh hearings opened up for me an opportunity to think about how to re-arrange our hearings and confirmation processes around a rhetorical first principle instead of this incredibly bad 15th party version of some Socratic version of truth. It’s nonsense in the political to believe that soul-truths would be the best way to govern. What you need is flexibility, situational awareness, and command of the power to rewrite reality with well-chosen articulations. This is a Supreme Court ability set, if you think we need one.

So what would the hearings look like? I would suggest instead of investigating “Character” – which nobody we elected seems to understand what that might mean given the questions – we should ask questions around the most important issue for a justice: What is your conception of the Universal Audience?

The Universal Audience is the creation of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca in their book The New Rhetoric. They argue that when we are arguing we are imagining our audience. That audience is not the actual audience we will engage with, but it is the audience we feel is worth engaging. That’s a huge difference, and can cause some problems. For example, what if you imagine the only audience worth engaging is people who “get it” in the terms of class, political view, race, et cetera – all the accidental characteristics people can have? This then excludes large parts of the audience that are legitimate. This is why BP debate internationally is nonsense – speakers exclude anyone who hasn’t practiced BP from their conception of what is persuasive, rendering their approach to argumentation unethical, at least. It is pandering, and it’s something to be avoided in ethical argumentation.

According to the Universal Audience theory, there is an ethical way to do this which is to double check yourself and determine if you are committing the fallacy of substituting a vanguard audience – a specialist audience, but not just specialized in an academic subject, but perhaps even class or race or other exclusionary characteristics – for the universal audience which includes people who are not factually present, but due to the content and the scope of the material deserve to be present in the discourse. This is how I interpret Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca when they write, “The Universal Audience is not a matter of fact, but of right.” Who has a right to be included in your argumentation? Who has the right to be assumed when you are speaking?

By now you can see that Kavanaugh’s universal audience fails on a couple of fronts, mostly due to his argumentative responses to the accusations of Dr. Ford and others. His rhetorical performance fails to include appropriate stakeholders and we can see that via performance. His argumentation is structured, as all of our arguments are, toward who we imagine counts. He does not imagine that these women, and these sorts of claims that are made by women, matter.

How can we make this critique rhetorically, or at least, consistently with the theory I’ve discussed? Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca offer the idea of the undefined universal audience, which is the ethical check on the easy slide between a vanguard and a universal. The undefined universal audience is the conception of how that audience was formed by the speaker, given his or her conditions, and whether the criterion or locus of the generation of that audience was done ethically. The Undefined universal audience is a good way to evaluate whether a speaker has invoked inappropriate bias in the framing of why their position is acceptable, and why we should believe it. This comes from structure as well as content (“I got into Yale” is a good example of both).

The undefined universal audience is a criticism that picks up on both what the speaker did to frame that audience, and whether or not the members of that universal audience are indicated in enough of the grounded, actual audiences that intersect all the time. This isn’t an appeal to intersectionality per se, but it could easily function along side it since it’s easy to assume any audience member is a composite of multiple identities both asserted and ascribed, and persuasive rhetoric is always pulling one forward and pushing others back (an audience view of how Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca’s concept of “presence” and “amplification” might work).

So Kavanaugh’s universal audience of “Americans” is unethical since it does not consider the legitimacy of those who are women, nor those who did not attend elite schooling. Supreme Court judges must imagine universal audiences when making decisions. Can Kavanaugh form an undefined universal audience in these situations? Or would he mistake “Americans” or “citizens” for a vanguard audience?

This is the sort of questioning that would be quite meta, and quite valuable to listen to for us as we consider the evergreen question of who counts as American. Framing a universal audience, as in how to persuade people is always automatically answering the question “Who deserves to be persuaded?” And that understanding is a way to ethically check our arguments to make sure we aren’t using the idea of reason to erase large swaths of legitimate members of our society.

For the sixth time (maybe?) I travelled up to Montana to do a workshop and run a small BP tournament for those amazing people from the snowy west in Montana. I really like going out there, although this time I had some reservations about it.

I always have reservations about it though. The first reservation is that they really don’t need me. How many years does it really take to be able to teach debate? Well, like chess, not a lot. The rules are really simple. And if you’ve seen a few debates, you sort of get what it is to look for (it’s not as complicated as the CA vanguard would have you believe; you are just looking for what’s persuasive to a general audience. Why we don’t have audiences is a mystery though). Anyway, they always argue that it’s diversity of viewpoint and opinion and the attraction of an outside person teaching and all that. I feel bad going because it most likely costs a lot and I don’t want to waste people’s money. What do I know about debate anyway? I just read old books, get excited about them, and talk to people about them.

Here’s what I said in Montana. It might very well be one of my last formal debate appearances, so I thought i’d film it at the weirdest angle I could think of. Actually it’s just an accident as we had to move rooms – I can’t really teach without a screen or some whiteboard action.

I still try to incorporate the ideas of Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca into debating as I feel that these are the most instructional theories. But my summer research was about Roman teaching methods and Roman rhetoric pedagogy, so that seems exciting too. I prepared a couple of hours of material but only had about 45 minutes. So maybe this is something I should record as a YouTube channel video, me just talking to the camera. Very weird, but I could do it I guess. The best would be to set it up in a university classroom, but with the status of our facilities you’d think I was talking from a condemned building. It’s not nearly as nice as the 1,000 student college this lecture was filmed in.

So should I continue to do this work? I like teaching, I like teaching lots of people all over the place. I don’t like debate anymore and I have removed myself as much as I can from the world of debating. But I feel like debate is a good pathway toward the study of rhetoric, which matters quite a bit more. Rhetoric is the antidote to debate, which is colonized by incredibly poor and shallow standards of proof from science and journalism. Rhetoric is the true discourse of science and journalism, because it includes the status of facts in the mix of the persuasive. Journalists and scientists believe facts to be outside of discourse. This is why these discourses never help us understand our world; they are always unsatisfying because we so very rarely have a hand in their creation.

BP debate is doing well in Montana for a few reasons. First, they do not travel the international circuit, which better mimics community norms for persuasion and argumentation. Local and regional debate is always of a better quality than a large international or national competition circuit because the norms are much more murky and flexible. If you are having a huge international competition or tournament, you have to make rigid the rules and the nature of judgement so people do not feel their money is wasted. I feel that it’s wasted money if you are interested in teaching or learning about the complexities of rhetoric, but most of the people who go there are just trophy-hunters, less interested in the art or the experience than they are the prize. It really is a sport, without any of the elements that make sports worth watching.

Local BP and regional BP is great as well because local audiences can be included. Smaller field, more time between debates, more of a chance to schedule debates when audiences can actually attend. This changes things in a huge way. Appeals angle toward the audience not toward the rules of fairness or what the CAs want the tournament to look like. Adaptation toward an audience is more instructional about how argumentation works than any appeal to a rule or a set of practices developed to make tournaments run smoothly.

I don’t know if I’ll go back, this might be the last one, but September is a long way off. A lot can change in 12 months. All options open is the best way to roll. Except I’m not going to run a debate program again. You can count on that one.

The new semester is here and it’s time to

They have renamed all the donuts in the on-campus Dunkin’ Donuts and I cannot deal with it. The names are just too much and I keep taking pictures of them.

Now that we are jelly-brating, some news you may have heard already: I am no longer directly or indirectly responsible for or teaching a debate program. I handed it back over to the university to see what else I can do with my time. Of course, the real reasons are not that selfish, and they are also not public. Maybe one day I’ll post them here, but for now just know that things are better than I could have imagined. I feel like I have a new job, and there are all sorts of new perspectives I’ve taken on due to that. Most of them have to do with how and why we teach public speaking at the university, but there are a few other ones too.

I have to get back to writing and course prep for now – I have a big paper coming due that I did not budget enough time to complete. Now the heat is on. And the blog must suffer.

The eulogies will never end. Everyone is talking about the death of John McCain using the strangest language about “service” and “honor” and the like. It’s no surprise – as Aristotle tells us praising Athens before the Athenians is barely a challenge. Tropes of hard work, dedication, loyalty, honor, love of country, self-sacrifice, and others are so easy to generate to call them thought would be overkill. John McCain died from a horrible illness, and death is almost always, almost universally, by all audiences, considered to be a loss. But the amount of praise McCain gets from people who disagreed with him, or thought his ideas and policies were bad, says a lot about what we value, or don’t value. 

At around the same time McCain died, playwright Neil Simon also passed away. The attention Simon’s death generated was paltry to that of McCain. Neil Simon wrote some of the most popular, appealing, and probably the most produced plays (if you count high school theater and speech competitions as production) in the world. He brought us a very complex, very humorous and sad, very intense portrait of human affairs. And that’s why he’s not treated the same way in death as John McCain.

McCain’s job, like any politician or senator, is to simplify incredibly complex issues in a way to either garner support from them, or to make his support for them intelligible. This principle is applied to everything, to the point of harming understanding and harming appreciation for the issue itself. McCain’s “service” that he is so praised for could refer to his time in the military or his time as a senator. Oddly, his awful time in the military did not inspire him to call for demilitarization or even raise the question of why to have such a large fighting force. He took it as a given, as natural, and called those who did not support it unpatriotic. McCain’s “service” made him and his family very wealthy, and it also gave him what Kenneth Burke called “occupational psychosis,” the natural lean to see the world in the terms of your profession or perspective. As a military man, he saw the world as a military problem, and was happy to reduce and “cook down” issues to this simple formula. As an example, I watched one of the many panegyrics on TV for McCain – an old former senator – talk about how McCain always said that issues were about “men and mission” just like in the military. Not only is this stupid, it excludes everyone who does not identify as a man as well as reducing the work of government to something like a video-game level. Do we want to think of governance as a mission? Do we want to think of the people involved in these issues as “men,” with all the military association that comes with? McCain did, but I don’t believe he was that interested in thinking. Making reduction your principle of understanding betrays your motives quite well. McCain, a career politician, probably said, “well look it is really just one issue here” more times than any sane person should. McCain is praised for service, but I think the more appropriate term is “servile” – beholden to shoring up absolute concepts of value regardless of what violence they do to the world. We as a society love that. We love it when someone “sticks to their principles” regardless of the wake of damage it causes. Delusion like this, often referred to as ideology, has a long history of being praised, simply because of the ideology we have of strong, single-minded individuals who don’t change their minds being good people. This is of course in direct contrast to our lamenting society’s inability to understand facts. McCain, and many others, are part of the problem as they spread this shoring-up, simplistic discourse in order to consolidate their power, enrich themselves, and somehow govern the nation.

Neil Simon, on the other hand, celebrated and worked toward complexity. Far from reduction, Simon split his view of the world into multiple, contrasting voices and had them talk to one another. He put them in impossible situations and had them talk about it. He then had these performances placed before audiences to generate even more conversation.  In his plays, each character is as sympathetic as they are annoying. This seems like daily life, yet it’s represented in a way that provides inquiry into understanding rather than the reduction needed to garner an understanding. For example, Simon would give us a controversy and involve people who would expose their motives through speech in a way that would make us dislike them for the very reasons we understood where they were coming from. Such emotional contrast would make us rethink our attribution of motives ourselves, and wonder how we understand at all. Such work, very difficult to do, is what Mikhail Bakhtin identified as “dialogism” – placing voices and ways of speaking in contrast that would not naturally interact. Simon was a master of this, and as a result, we got a very sneaky way of inquiring into our own motives, our own biased ways of viewing and knowing the world. Simon’s world is one where uncertainty is welcome, and we evaluate argumentation and conflict from several perspectives at once. The result is an inquiry into motives and values. An inquiry into how we know what is right, bad, good, or sad. Such an operation slows us down, makes us think, and makes us less likely to engage in eradication of views that are not our own. A plethora of discourse, speakers, and modalities often gets a laugh, but that laugh is the first step toward taking inventory – “Am I like that?”

John McCain is celebrated because he oversimplified the world and made us feel good about it, even if we thought his votes and policies were not good. We admire him because he “served” his country – whatever that means. Reduction always converts the anxiety of understanding as a practice into the comfort of understanding as fact. If you are right you no longer have to think. No wonder we miss him.  McCain’s work was that of stripping away the complexities that make us recognize our humanity rather than shoring up oversimplicities to make it easier to funnel money and power on a global scale.

Neil Simon gave us no such comfort. His work placed human complexity and frailty right in front of us to show us our understanding was always incomplete. We saw our dependence on language and the incapability of language on stage in familiar situations. We wondered if we were like those characters. We wondered why we liked them even if they were flawed. We wondered about what it meant to care for someone else. All the questions were raised and open. A very dangerous feeling, best consigned to entertainment. He confronted us with the impossibility of knowing as anything more than a practice that must be defended. No wonder his funeral is not televised; no wonder his obituary is on the theater page. Truly insightful people who cared not for country, but for humanity, threaten our comfort. When we gain the sort of love we have for militaristic simplicity for the fungibility of value and the power of language, we will treat our Neil Simons better than our servile senators.