The New York Sophist

Last weekend in Montana I opened myself up to all questions from the debaters. One asked, “How do you keep everything in your head so that you can recall it to be able to use it in debates?” This question struck me as being at the heart of debate and rhetorical education – the question of preparation and knowledge.

I tested one of my oldest debate metaphors as a response: “Being a good debater is more Bene Gesserit than Mentat. You don’t have to be a human computer rife with information, you have to be aware and listen and adapt to the context you find yourself in.”

“Did you just make a Dune reference?”

Yes, yes I did. I should do it more often. There are few books right now that speak as well to our world. Herbert was an autodidact’s autodidact. He absorbed everything and tried to include it in his story. He even tried to invent a new science, planetology, which he included in his story. He was someone who was trying to find a nexus point between different types of knowing in order to craft a believable universe with its own politics, it’s own history, and its own sciences and economy. I think he was pretty successful.

This weekend I was catching up on reading and caught the excellent essay  in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Dune and the historical sources Herbert borrowed from to make his epic book.

Quite possibly the coolest cover.

Typical debate instruction is very much like Frank Herbert’s Mentats. Trained from birth to account, gather data, analyze it and make policy recommendations, the connection to the ideal debating subject is pretty obvious. Mentats can take any amount of data and compare it against itself in order to devise a strategy. They are immersed in data and information, have near instant recall, and hardly ever make a mistake in judgement.

Being a mentat is near impossible. One has to be trained from birth almost to be able to work one’s mind in a way reserved for the most powerful computers. But in Herbert’s world they are more trusted than a sea of advisors, or even the best computers. The human brain, according to Herbert’s vision, is the best computer out there – if only it can be trained from an early age.

Most people assume that when a speaker appears knowledgeable it is because they have knowledge. They know things and that knowledge is part of them. But recognition of knowledge is a performance, it’s something communicated to an audience. Knowledge is performed, it is made recognizable so the audience says, “Oh, that guy knows his stuff.”

This is a lot more like Jessica than any Mentat in the books. The Bene Gesserit “weirding way” relies a lot on context, position, audience, and of course, words. While people fetishize the subject who commands a lot of facts, a lot of data, it is the Bene Gesserit order that has seeded nearly every planet with the origins of a messianic tale that can be activated by anyone who can read the scene and respond appropriately. Compare the actions of Jessica, her husband murdered and her house nearly destroyed, making a path for survival for herself and her son to Piter, the mentat who dies because he cannot foresee that the Duke would kill himself with a poison gas capsule concealed in a false tooth.

Information is one thing, context is something else. We tend to think of context, audience, position and location as a type of information, a type of knowledge, but we really undersell it. The ability to read a scene, to see the story that you are already interpolated within, and to act in a way to capture the key roles of that story and be influential, well, that’s debating. Debating is not a regurgitation of facts and information. It’s the ability to convince an audience what the limits of information look like. You can include and exclude whatever you wish.

Debate should be taught as if it were the Weirding way – no, the weirdest way – the way that calls everything, including facts, into question in order to be able to defend good limits for the state of information, knowledge, and fact when a decision is on the line. Mentats can help provide a lot of information and analysis, and we fetishize that sort of subject, the subject who has “mastered knowledge.” Meanwhile as we pine away for the Mentat, the Bene Gesserit is the one setting up the scene, the arguments, and the approach that will take advantage – like a magical enthymeme – of tales laid down in our minds and hearts years ago. We have to be trained from birth to be a Mentat, but we are all prepared from our first bedtime story to be the unwitting co-conspirator of a Bene Gesserit witch.

Weekends are not something I have thought about for much of my adult life. They were the times that I would go off to debate tournaments, the places where real education happened, the places where I could really feel like I was learning and doing something that mattered. Plus, they were really fun. It was a good time to try to do better than others in making good arguments. I rarely did very well, but I did do my best, or at least I felt like I did. Sometimes that can really make you feel pretty bad about yourself as you sit on the school bus rolling back home in the dark. 

Now that I’m older, weekends mean a lot more than that. They are the few days when I have absolute control over my schedule and can do what I like – or let my plans crumble apart as I have done this weekend. Yesterday I did mean to write a post, I really did – I spent the day out at Adelphi University for meetings and conversation with a great friend. One of the people that only debate can conjure up and push into your life. It was a great time. We met to discuss a series of debates we’d like to do here in the city. We got some work done and I got to enjoy trying to catch up on work in a different spot. Being out there makes me appreciate good workspaces, something that St. John’s does not appreciate, and I don’t think they ever will. Space is an afterthought here, something contractually obligated to provide – and little thought or attention is given to the idea of how it communicates purpose. I used to go up to my graduate student office frequently. Now that I am a tenured faculty member, I try to avoid my office at all costs. This is the difference in what space can say and mean.

Today I did some planning for a series of social justice debates that will happen at John Jay college and then again a month after at Morehouse in Atlanta. The debates are about the role and nature of prisons. This is good work – reading interesting books along with the students and trying to come up with some interesting and persuasive things to say from all points of view. It’s giving me a lot of hope and ideas for when Argumentation becomes a core curriculum course in just 2 years. My public speaking class, in connection with a theology class that they are all a part of, is doing a debate as an assignment as well. Need to brush up on those readings so I can help them say what they would like, and most importantly, say it effectively.

The weekend has really changed for me. When I was a teenager it was the time to do exciting, fun debates and travel to exotic locations such as Plano, Texas, a whole hour and a half from where I lived. As a young adult, debate was the place to do the real work of education, to get the students away from the stifling high school and the people who called themselves teachers but were interested in disciplining minds and bodies to their own specifications. The weekend was a place of expansion and discovery, not trickery, subservience, and obedience like school. Now that I’m middle age, the weekend is a great respite from conformity to demands on my time – I can either bend time to my will, or, as I have been discovering recently, find great pleasure in letting time push me around a bit, doing one thing and then another, until I find myself tired and head off to bed. 

Tomorrow will be another such day except the British Debate tour rolls into town and I have to get them set up for their three days in the city. I’m still pretty sore that I only have 2 actual days with them, considering all that could have been planned – they won’t even see my campus, for example, but I know the audience for the debate will be much better in Manhattan, and an audience is what debate students sorely need to practice argument.  I hoped to have written a bit about the final round from Montana, but the computer crashed before it was done rendering, so that will have to wait until another time.

Didn’t think today would be a “day off” but it quickly became that as I slept in to the impossible hour of 9AM then proceeded to really do next to nothing for most of the day yesterday. I finally got around to some productive stuff around dinner, planning to hit the sack early for a long Thursday ahead. 

Thought off and on about the need to distinguish an alternative discourse for pedagogy, one that does not assume we are teaching skills and that skills are what students need and those skills are then brought to bear on a world that will give them material rewards. Instead, I would like a teaching discourse that allows students to be and exist, to help them practice that, and to enrich and present themselves to themselves via practice. Assignments that push this model of pedagogy are hard to imagine because, well, they don’t really seem to be able to be measured by anything but the old, dug in model of evaluation – skill development. 

I am seeking creative assignments. These are assignments where skills are not tested but creativity is practiced. This book I just read called Footsteps gave me some cool ideas. It is a collection of essays from The New York Times that sends a reporter to a city that is associated with a famous literary figure. They write about impressions of the place given what we know about the literary figure, the city, and what he or she did when living there. It’s a great collection and the essays could not be more different. The only purpose of these essays, except to make money by encouraging the circulation of newspapers obviously, was to provide a nexus of two extant bodies of data in order for the reader to think differently about a literary figure with which they might have some great familiarity. I read the Kerouac chapter with great interest, but it didn’t shine any new information on him for me. It was an interesting perspective, since they chose the fire lookout cabin in which he spent a summer one year. Odd to pick that over New York, Denver, or San Francisco – all cities much more important to Kerouac than a small town outside of Seattle. 

I read the book to go to a book club but sadly I was too sick to go. I’m pretty sad about it as I was interested in meeting some new folks to talk books with. I hope I’m able to go next month, but I should get going on the new book if I plan to attend. Things just spiral out of control in the early fall and I’m still not sure why that is. 

I was thinking about assigning a speech with a similar tone to the essays in Footsteps. I like the idea of students assembling two sets of data together for the reflection upon two more familiar things. The laying of one thing on top of another is an old method of rhetorical inventio to be sure, but what a cool thing to have students do to show them how easy it is to be creative and to generate new thoughts. The question is: What sets of data can I have them combine? Maybe they could pick a remake of an old song and find commonalities and differences in the bands? Perhaps a couple of different films about the same thing? Or an element of flim? (The car chase, the shootout, the kiss, the near miss, the double-cross, etc.) Or I could have them pick a neighborhood in New York and find something to lay over it. Food seems like a good thing to add to the assignment – different foods and their reception and production in different parts of New York? The original idea is also a good one – famous writer and the city they lived in while working – not too bad of a task. But I wonder if I could push them to include writers they wouldn’t think of as “writers” – the poets of hip-hop, the comedians they love, etc. Things like that might not strike them as classroom appropriate, or what their professor sees as a valuable author to study.

Not sure where this is going, but I would like to provide opportunities to create and produce other creative thought, not merely replicate the skills that I imagine people have used to carve resources out of society for one’s consumption. Teaching people how to be consumers seems to be the university’s full time program these days – how to consume courses, credits, and tasks in order to gain a degree to pursue a life primarily ordered around consumption. My task will be to push back on this hegemony just a little with the idea that we can produce things, ideas, and moments that are much more valuable, fun, and engaging to consume than anything that can be found on Netflix. We must encourage students to craft and build not just copy and deploy the moves of the past if we are to make the university valuable for being a university, not for being a place where one finds one’s career among a number of options for work. 

This is the first debate video I’ve shot with my new wide angle lens for my now ancient, but very handy videocamera. It’s a commercial camcorder, which, as anyone who has watched video on YouTube about making videos will tell you, is a terrible choice. Everyone says to use a DSLR or Mirrorless camera and just record video that way. This camera though is so good and has done such a great job through the years it’s hard to imagine anything beating it. This video looks and sounds great, and could be a demo debate that could be used quite a bit for teaching purposes. Very happy with it.

The Montana workshop is something that I agreed to do not really fully knowing what it would become. I figured at the time I agreed to start going up there and doing a weekend at the start of the year that Montana and the various regional schools that participate would simply fold themselves into the national scene. What we have instead is a very nice regional even that welcomes a lot of folks into debating who might not do it otherwise, or might do it but not really feel sure about it, and the defeats at the first major tournament might encourage them to leave it. 

This debate I thought was quite good as it exhibits a number of different approaches to a motion that could have multiple concurrent opposition positions – one could be against the DREAM Act, against the Wall, both, or against the idea of compromising with Trump or the Democrats (which is far too rare a position to appear in debate-land). In this environment, government teams have very little room to establish what they would like to do and opposition teams have a ton. I think you’ll like the varying approaches you’ll see down the benches. 

We didn’t declare a winner but you could comment and let me know what you thought was best in the debate. It was a good way to start of the season of competitive debate instruction for me. Already looking forward to going again next September to Billings. 

Well I finally missed one – it was bound to happen. Yesterday was a very long travel day and although I did have time to write while waiting for a flight in Denver, I just didn’t really feel like it. I ran out of cold medicine Sunday night, so I knew Monday would be pretty rough coming back. I was just taking it easy. If I only miss one that would be pretty good.

This morning I’m in a reflective mood. The rain is moving in, and the desktop is already processing video and photos in the other room. I have a lot of email to answer and two more debate trips to plan today. Tonight is a debate meeting which I look forward to. Hoping more new folks show up. LIfe gets pretty busy in the fall term, and I always forget how busy it is.

The trip to Montana this year provided a few take aways:

1. An enemy of debate that I underestimated is instrumentality.

I realized this in judging the final round (which was excellent). I believe that instrumentality is the primary philosophy behind most all debate education and is the basis of the “good speech” model that most competitors use. This approach no doubt is responsible for the weirdness of motions, the weird ways that people within debate react to motions that would be considered interesting and good by the general public, and the hidden methods of evaluation of debate speeches. 

I always feel a little anxious and nauseated when people ask me to teach at a “debate workshop” or provide a “workshop” for debaters. I feel like several things might happen: I will sell out and talk about “the 5 things all PM speeches miss” or some nonsense and then hate myself all night; I won’t sell out and the students will feel cheated, like “what the hell was that? He didn’t help me do anything!”; Or I’ll try to work my own ideas into some instrumental model of debate education and it will not be enough of either for me to be happy or the students to be happy. 

This time I think I’ve figured out that If I just teach rhetorical ideas, the rest of it will follow. Debaters are drawn to debate because they are thinkers and they are curious. These are traits that are easily stamped out by the competitive norms, making them obedient to “what wins” and admire the “great speakers” they find on YouTube or at other competitions. Appealing to these things was pretty successful when giving the workshop this time. Also it was great to have a collection of smart people to have a conversation with in front of the crew. The idea that debate is transmitted from those who know to those who don’t is a failure. It’s a conversation among practitioners about what works, what doesn’t, and what is worth trying. I think we accomplished that at the Saturday morning workshop.

2. Small Regions that Interact Infrequently is How Debate Thrives

Steve Johnson at the University of Anchorage said this to me during an interview in an early episode of In The Bin. I didn’t totally agree with him as during those years I was very excited to be on the edge of a growing national circuit. But a national circuit is a normalizing circuit; it is the death of debate’s most important elements: creativity and imagination, approaching issues rather than approaching strategies. National competition requires the most bland spices available if any due to the different palates that you have to satisfy in the judging pool. 

Montana is one of these places where when I watch people speak I remember what attracted me to the BP format in the first place. These speeches are aimed at a public audience, not at those who appreciate a technical skill. When moving between these circuits, what keeps us connected is attention to what’s being written, discussed, and posted in the public sphere. That’s where our matter should be drawn for topics and arguments. Not “we’ve done this before” or “we’ve never seen such a crazy motion!” Those standards are the result of thinking about debate as a broad, bland, technical skill mastery event rather than a community of thinkers gathering together to practice being intellectuals. The latter is my weekend experience and I would like to see more of this, and less concern about Worlds or USU in the instruction and practices of debaters. 

More reflections I’m sure are on the way. I just wanted to get those two out this morning before I turn to more menial writing tasks. Videos should be up tonight and I’ll post some links to them when they are ready.