The New York Sophist

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.

Midterm exams are overhyped, stupid, and a mode of social control to remind students that they are in the “to be disciplined” category by a group of people (professors and such) that know more than them and will always know more than them. It’s such a waste of time.

Midterm elections are quite similar here in the U.S. where all my usually intelligent, critical, and thoughtful friends become hucksters of angry discipline, making fun of everyone who questions the need to vote, angrily shouting (if possible) across social media that voting confirms ones existence and is the only way to justify having any opinion on politics whatsoever. There’s even a number of people who believe that they are participating in the conversations that will steer the future of the country. I know, I know. You’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that they are normally very, very smart.

Moments of discipline are fantastic for reinforcing social control schemes under the rhetoric of “advancement,” “improvement,” or the more conservative modes of “duty,” “rights,” or “obligation as a citizen.” It’s funny that in any other given time of the year I would see posts about the absolute ridiculous ideologies held up by relations to the state and how those ideologies are best gone and forgotten. But not VOTING oh no. It’s the best thing ever. Ever I say.

Well enough about that. Herbert Marcuse has questioned such angry disciplinarity toward voting in a much more nuanced way than I ever could. And I’m sure you are tired of hearing me go on and on about how a simplistic, binary relationship to voting is exactly what the political establishment wants. All that money time and energy spent to give people a pittance of a selection of who will go to Washington or the State Capitol in their name and accept special interest money. What a waste.

Discipline is something that we teach more than anything else in formal education. Discipline, not creativity, not questioning, not curiosity – we complain that students don’t come to the classroom with these things and then we spend the whole time on 15 page writing guides that tell them how many points a misplaced comma will cost them.

In argumentation and speech we teach a discipline of tearing apart, something that Peter Elbow calls “the doubting game” in composition, but in rhetoric we teach the “cynicism game.” It’s the teaching that no set of proof will ever be enough to prove something, so tear it apart, the argument is meaningless.

I think the doubting game could be good if it were actually teaching doubt. What I mean is if it just hung out around the questions: How do you know? Where does that information come from? What’s the alternative?, etc. Instead we have to take these questions and militarize them toward the destruction of the argument in question.

Not accepting an argument doesn’t mean we have to destroy it. A moderate position is often the most critical and informative position that can be taken in politics. Being uncertain is a great way to approach most questions, but it also affords you the ability to see new possibilities. Instead of camping out on the destruction of the polar opposite of your view, you can pick up some of the other elements of the position and use them for other purposes.

Peter Elbow suggests in Writing without Teachers that we should teach a believing game to counter the most negative effects of the doubting game – namely, cynicism. I think this is the right move, but I prefer the uncertainty game, or the ambivalence game. In how many ways can we interrogate the position offered until we begin to feel the irresistible pull toward affirmation, negation, or a third way?

I think ripping ideas apart has chilled people’s desire to read new ideas, after all, they are probably all wrong. It has also chilled people’s creative urge to express themselves for fear they may be wrong (read: will be wrong). Without curiosity about what others are saying and the creative urge to assemble new texts, you cannot have a successful variant of any form of democracy. You have to generate texts upon texts, assess them, and create others. You have to be generating discourse, not just tearing it apart.

But we’d rather have the ease and familiar fear of discipline in our classrooms and hold those grades up high because then we won’t have to sit in a classroom on a warm afternoon at the end of the fall, silently stare at one another, and realize that we don’t know what we think we know. Maybe this is what it really looks like to be on the edge of Burke’s abyss?

Got back a little less than a week ago from the Center for CSPAN Scholarship and Engagement conference at Purdue University and it was super cool.

Brought my new GoPro7 along and shot a few videos. There’s one more coming but I don’t want to edit it tonight.

Vlogging is a pretty hard thing to master. I need to learn how to keep the camera more level with me, and also how to get some better audio. The aluminum handle I was using wasn’t any good at all, the mic picks up every single move of my hand on the surface. I have another tripod handle thing that I think will do a lot better.

Here are some videos!

Thinking about you . . .