The New York Sophist

where should we start in class? With organization? Research? Developing an audience profile?

Wherever you start teaching in a speech or argumentation or debate course, that is where you are positing the start of rhetoric. 

The question of a start is the establishment of ends. What is the purpose of rhetoric? Why learn and study it?  

I was gifted this great textbook from 1900 the other day, and the authors start with style. Most public speaking instructors probably cover style, near the end of the term, along with ethics, in the sense that “audiences expect different things so speak the way they want. Now, back to the importance of a bibliography.”

This attention to style could be seen as evidence of the simplistic refutation of rhetoric as being surface-only, an affront to the deep consideration of the true that philosophy, et. al. deal with. 

It could be the understanding that style is the only way we have to understand truth. If it comes across in one way rather tha  another it wont matter how true it is.  

in starting with style, this book doesnt mince words. Theres a much better understanding of acceptability than we get today. Most public speaking courses convey an obsession with facts. Facts are the only style needed. Bring your references of various types and you’ll be believed. Qe grade a lot more on references than oration, as if we have lost faith in rhetoric as a productive, creative force for good. 

Where is the faith in oratory to make the world? probably in the same spot we left our faith in students. The last time students were praised as a group I cant remember. Instructors at my university praise an I individual student, but with the tone of surprised exception. The student is impressive because students are supposed to be terrible, and this one isn’t. It’s a sad situation. 

Where is our belief or sense that the world is more than a selection of careers? That making money means you are successful? that good grades mean you know things? All of these questions should be able to dissolve easily in the hands of the trained orator. Then be reconstituted as immutable truths. 

But no. Far more important they learn how to cite a scholarly source isn’t it? That’s our style and hence our truth. If the facts dont work, we just shrugand call others stupid. If only we had a practice that could be used to reconstitute stupidity and facts into a pliable substance for making things, attitudes, people, and thoughts. 

Queens Boulevard yesterday afternoon

I wanted to write this post on the subway and the bus however my mobile wireless was giving me problems. It wasn’t until I got to about where I needed to go that it cut back on. I don’t know if there was a tower issue with T-Mobile or if it’s with my phone, but either way it was annoying. We’ll see how it works today – headed to campus again and also to hit up the bank. 

I bought some replacement furniture yesterday. Something about the summer means it’s time to refresh everything. I think it’s because most of my life, and all of my adult life, I’ve lived on the agrarian-haunted academic calendar. The new year starts in September, and the end of things is around May. So when the end of July hits, I start really thinking about what’s new, what to change, and what to clean off. 

To that end, public speaking is getting a whole new work up this term. It seems that creativity, or the act of making, inventing ideas for the sharing and consideration of others, is absent. We have social media as a creative outlet, but participation in the consumption of pieces written by others is not invention. We have cool sites like last.fm (which I love), goodreads, youtube histories, instagram (consume what I’m showing you that I am seeing), etc. They all work very well. But they don’t stand in for creating one’s own self, they are appetizers for that. Nobody wants to base a relationship with someone else, friendship or otherwise, on “Do you like X” where X is a director, a band, a movie series, etc. But this is our way of sizing people up.

In addition to that operation, we should consider how malleable and fungible our positions are. Currently students tend to think that people are in intransitive states – that expressing a politically disturbing or disgusting position means that you are irrevocably, ontologically that expression, and the best thing to do is ostracize you, or shout at you, or whatever the remedy might be. Conversion via persuasion is not on the list unless it’s part of the performance and expression of truth. The understanding that our identity is by our positioning of the self within what we consume, and expressing what we consume or don’t consume as “who we are,” means that the attempt to change someone’s mind, or that a mind is changeable even, fades to the background. Part of the culprit for this is the reliance on rules such as “reason” when we teach people what a good argument is. Argument is not a rules-based or rules-dependent operation. It’s results-driven, which is a fallacy for a lot of thinkers right off the bat. To study it by positing boudaries, rules, illegal operations, borders, and the like is to offer up argumentation as just one more object one can consume and show it has been consumed in order to fashion identity. 

So I’m teaching a Roman curriculum, more or less, this fall and we’ll see how it goes. The focus is on having students engage in speeches on difficult questions, controversiae and suasiorae type speeches from the old republic. I’ve been thinking about how to generate these cases for consideration, and I think one of the best things might be for the students to have a strong hand in the crafting of these cases. So perhaps a formula for creating a good case could be: 

1. Figure – the nature of the person or people involved that you are giving advice to. Why are they the decision maker?

2. clear expression as to what’s at stake in the decision

3. all of the possible results from each decision should be clear and should carry equal weight but at best, equal weight in different spheres (economic vs. ethic is one that will most likely resonate with a lot of university students)

I’ll think of some other guidelines today most likely. The goal is to create a number of cases that would be interesting and challenging to make arguments about. Those arguments are not based on what one has consumed, but what one feels normatively that society should be like. What changes should be made in our beliefs that will push us in that direction? Instead of reporting on something that should be consumed because it is good, ethical or right (for example, why we should support Bernie Sanders, why we should legalize marijunana, etc) we have a very specific, contextual moment that requires the creation of values tailored for that moment. What is it that we hold as valuable in situations like this that will inform action? What decision should be made? Who is right?

We’ll see how the experiment goes. Students come to the university these days, through no fault of their own, willing to consume and regurgitate what faculty want to hear. They want to be tested on what they can produce when the sign of the demand is made clear. What happens if that demand is not made? What happens if the demand to produce is made but there’s no container to fill? What if we have to determine whether it was good or not instead of accounting for the extant goodness that is supposedly already there in patterns of consumption?

In reading through various meeting minutes and dictated letters from the 1930s in my recent research work, I found this great oddity: 

Aliens confirmed. Well, aliens by metaphor only. Who is left who can read or write in shorthand?  

The technology of shorthand I imagine is pretty much lost. This is clearly a secretary cleaning up her (or possibly his but it would be a rarity) notes on the transcript of the meeting recorded here. There were recording technologies, like wire recording, that were used in dictation. But typewriters were unable to keep up. I bet today you’d have a tough time on a laptop keeping up with dictation. Maybe not. But shorthand was a technology to keep up with dictation in order to type and send the letter anyway, or in this case to record and produce the minutes of a meeting.  

Shorthand is one of these things that had utility when there was a gap in the ability of technology to cover time. The mechanical typewriter is too cumbersome to compose at, and was used for final copy only. With shorthand you could get verbatim anything anyone was saying.  

The price for this was no joke. Many times in the archive I found discussions of budgets for these organizations, and one of the top concerns was the price of stenography services. Sometimes for the month this could be hundreds of 1930s dollars – which would be thousands today. A very significant office expense, but if you wanted to do business in a particular way and at a particular volume, you really had to have it.  

I wonder what other technologies like shorthand have fallen to the side. Will laptops or swipe keyboards be like this? Emojis? I wonder. 

Woke up today and worked more on my long-term writing project about debating. I woke up with the question: If we are seeing a radical change in the way that people evaluate information, trust experts, consider what a fact is, and all that, why is our solution to just double-down on teaching the fallacies, tests of evidence, and scientifically derived notions of truth? It’s like if something breaks, you try to figure out why it broke, not do the thing you were doing beforehand even more intensely. 

I actually just really don’t think things have changed, we are just noticing that facts don’t get us a lot and don’t do a lot for us versus presentation, representation, and interpretation. Like salt though, facts make these different dishes have good flavor if used in the right amounts. 

Today I’m about to head to campus to pick up another ILL book that came in when I was in Maryland. In case you didn’t see the vlogs from last week here they are!

I shot these in 4k on an action cam which i really liked versus using my handycam which seems a bit big, especially with the microphone and all of that. I think that the size is not that different from a DSLR or other style camera, and just as bulky, but the action cam is the only thing I have that shoots 4k. I think they turned out ok even though they are a bit choppy. I might move down to half that resolution and shoot at 60fps on a more narrow field of view, then the videos will look pretty amazing. Most people are just watching them in 1080p anyway, at least for a couple of more years. 

Still thinking about the time I spent in the media archive at the University of Maryland. They have a lot of documentation – transcripts and recordings and the like – but most exciting is their collection of the technology of broadcasting. They have a remarkably well-preserved inventory of early televisions and old console-style radios.  

<img src='https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/3272077/23pv1du52GNphl3DWlmn7ZB94vU/thumb_FullSizeRender.jpg' class='posthaven-placeholder' width='48' height='48' data-posthaven-guid='nb_puC63Erp8igWPhS0jlgppXU4edMjw0gpRyiH6' unselectable='on' data-posthaven-type='image' undefined />

I like this microphone a lot even though it’s busted. The principles are the same now – keeping it suspended and shock-absorbent helps make a better sound. I always wondered why they put the call letters on the mics even though there was no picture being transmitted. The archivist explained that they take a lot of photos of radio shows in those times and it was good for that. Also these mics were expensive and would just be moved from the studio to the event that was covered live, and the press would get photos there of it, hopefully. It’s all about good publicity.

<img src='https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/3272078/6xEhBEfuOGk_PcVDrdur6YxaHLU/thumb_FullSizeRender.jpg' class='posthaven-placeholder' width='48' height='48' data-posthaven-guid='AeAcIhaOgr7_f75jUpC5n0TdqDsNRpKOGO7kERJN' unselectable='on' data-posthaven-type='image' undefined />

I think shortwave radio is really cool, and I know I’m pretty alone in that idea, but all the home console radios of the 1930s had shortwave tuners so you could hear the news from Europe anytime you wanted. They also included the police band and sometimes aircraft frequencies as well (much later on than 1930s). The other great thing to read about was the lack of regulation in broadcast signal strength, so there were a lot of stories of station owners pumping out 500,000 watt AM stations and being heard across the country or even on the other side of the world. Hillarious I think, what a great way to get rid of the other stations. 

This unit had the back panel off so we could look at the antenna, which was pretty substantial. No wonder they could pick up everything clearly via shortwave or whatever. FM signals are about 20 years away for this unit, but the design of it really makes you wonder – this is a unit that is meant to be on full display in a family room, to fit in with the furniture, and be something you are not ashamed to see. Radio design today says little more than, “I’m a very advanced stereo system.” I wonder what this design said to people in the 1930s and 1940s? Does it say “furniture” or does it say “technologically advanced?” What’s the message in the design here?

<img src='https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/3272080/7iM3mWFNppIXtPu8UgxB_YBELGQ/thumb_FullSizeRender.jpg' class='posthaven-placeholder' width='48' height='48' data-posthaven-guid='mrWmrYq2di9_-1lwwP1tp1zWG62xGNBHeapRpgdv' unselectable='on' data-posthaven-type='image' undefined />

You see these issues being addressed a lot clearer in the early televisions, which tried a lot to look like console radios like the one above. This unit is a great example of trying to bridge the TV/radio divide in a way that we can safely assume is speaking to the audience of the late 40s early 50s. 

This one also is trying to look like furniture but the presence of the screen and the attention that the screen compels is really an interruption here. Later models would come with cabinet doors to close off the screen when not in use. Even in the photo, your eyes want to go to the screen as the center of this unit’s design. Is that trained? Where does this compulsion come from? There is something about TV that compels attention even if you are not actively watching a show. You find yourself “looking up” at it without even thinking about it to see what’s going on. Also at this time 24 hour programming was unheard of, perhaps even something that would be undesired, so there was no point in having the TV available all the time. Having it in a cabinet makes the furniture appearance really easy – it’s just another hutch or cabinet in the living room.

<img src='https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/3272082/F9y9XpHqGUlarRk6PP0uJJci8Zo/thumb_FullSizeRender.jpg' class='posthaven-placeholder' width='48' height='48' data-posthaven-guid='o9DxTPQaow5jLWuaQM6LDThvVa9iVxCC_-J6F9qJ' unselectable='on' data-posthaven-type='image' undefined />

With this one, the attempt to resemble a radio is gone, and the screen has taken over the focus of the unit. But the doors indicate that this is still meant not to disrupt the organization of the living room at all, and can be removed from the scene by shutting the doors. This fascinates me as the contemporary living room is arranged around the television. This design indicates that the television interrupted the living room design, and needed to be incorporated into the room in a way that made sense. Just sitting out there as a big screen wasn’t going to cut it.

<img src='https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/3272084/k2fx_IjaGjj3Q9eg_aiA-hr-_A4/thumb_FullSizeRender.jpg' class='posthaven-placeholder' width='48' height='48' data-posthaven-guid='_d0FCRICwZ27hWW-rpjAyMgncyNV8MHS-h4SuUlA' unselectable='on' data-posthaven-type='image' undefined />

This is the best photo and the one I wanted to close on. This is a custom made RCA black and white TV that was built for a bar owner who wanted a big screen everyone could see when they came into the bar to watch sports and other events. So this is evidence that there has always been this desire to have big, loud TVs in the bar. This unit, from the dawn of TV, shows that TV has always been obnoxious. I bet 1950s bar patrons also complained about how you can’t just have a drink without some TV blaring in the background. 

What a great collection, and I’m so glad to have seen it. Who preserved all this stuff? Who kept it in such good condition over the decades? It makes me think about how easily we throw things away and how cheaply they are made. I wonder what, if anything of our broadcast technology, will survive for future archives?