The New York Sophist

Just back from another National Communication Association convention, and as usual I have the same reactions:

Great to see all of my friends and colleagues from around the country.

I regret that I have not spent every waking moment of my life before the conference reading books.

My work is more influential than I thought it was.

I’m going to return home and work tirelessly and ceaselessly every day on all these great ideas I have, starting immediately. 

I don’t know if these reactions are commonplace, nor if they fade away as quickly for most as they do for me (except for number 1, obviously). But it’s always something I don’t feel very prepared for, but once I get there I feel pretty together about everything. This year was the first one (been going since 2002) where I did not feel unprepared but just very comfortable about all the things I’d written and really eager to share them with other folks. 

I have a Tascam recorder that I like to use for lectures, audio stuff, debates, etc. and used that for a couple of panels here and there. Unfortunately, for the first time in its little life, it made terrible recordings. I think some setting got moved or something, but I’m going to try to improve the sound quality a bit and post them. They are still listenable, but don’t sound as great as they are supposed to. 

Also NCA should consider booking 2 hotels at least for the conference site that have large enough hotel bars to accommodate everyone! The bar at the Downtown Marriott was always packed.

Here are some other conclusions:

Debate is NCA’s Dirty Fetish

Most everyone in NCA has been brushed by, participated in, or enjoyed the company of those who have practiced the dark arts of debate. Debate is central to the thinking (maybe even the genesis of thinking) for a majority of the scholars that NCA recognizes as significant. Debate is seen as the roots of the discipline, the teaching and conditioning of expressive bodies into something that can shift gears and alter into ways that audiences can appreciate. Such intensive thinking of argument, evidence, and audience can’t help but create some great minds that want to produce texts for audiences about producing texts for audiences. 

Yet how many spotlight panels are there on the debate tradition in NCA? Debate as rhetorical education? Debate’s influence in NCA? How about zero. How about the sad fact that nobody but the organizers attended the Committee for International Discussion and Debate panel featuring the top debaters from the UK? All debate panels happen in places like “Salon J” at the tertiary hotel, far from the center of things, and definitely not in a spot where someone could wander by and join in upon hearing the discussion. Very much like those DVDs in the bottom drawer, or those magazines carefully hidden under the bed, debate is kept out of accidental, offensive view – but still available for moments when we think nobody is looking. 

Empty Chairs and Full Tables

Everyone decries the empty panel – the panel where there are more people around the table presenting than there are in the audience – as a huge problem. Many say that this indicates a lack of scholarly conversation, attention, or interest, or some evidence that we are not communicating our interests to one another or something like that. 

NCA is obviously a productive place – you just have to wander around with an open ear to hear all the productive conversations going on. Have a look at any nearby bar, restaurant, or hotel lobby and you see it. I come up with a lot of great ideas and projects just by randomly bumping into folks and having a chat. This is where the productive work is taking place. Of course, this happens when I see panels too, but not exclusively. 

The empty room syndrome is not a symptom of anything intellectual, but material. NCA is priced in a very expensive, exclusive way. Universities only provide funding to those who are presenting something. So this means that NCA has an obligation to accept more papers and panels than will be attended. And it’s not a problem. The presence of folks at NCA to bump into one another and share ideas is the real value. The paper presentations are the way we get that presence and interaction, even if we don’t go to very many of them (or, as is more likely, there are too many to attend, and you’d be exhausted if you went to every session).

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts as the week goes on. I had a great time in Philadelphia and hope to post the doctored audio recordings of a couple of my presentations pretty soon.

I was asked to give a talk at the University of Chicago this afternoon to some MBA students about the Presidential debates.  The lecture was done via WebEx, and this is the audio from my audio recorder that I sat down next to the laptop. You can’t really hear their end very well, but to be fair, the WebEx recording doesn’t pick them up either. The questions from the Q&A are repeated to me so you get the benefit of that as well. 

Here’s what I said. I think a pretty good critique of the debates might contain more specifics, but I thought approaching it broadly might be better.

I wonder if these events will ever change. Seems to me we’re stuck with them, at least until a force more influential than the Commission on Presidential Debates takes over. Looking at you, Facebook. 

I was asked to give a talk at the University of Chicago this afternoon to some MBA students about the Presidential debates.  The lecture was done via WebEx, and this is the audio from my audio recorder that I sat down next to the laptop. You can’t really hear their end very well, but to be fair, the WebEx recording doesn’t pick them up either. The questions from the Q&A are repeated to me so you get the benefit of that as well. 

Here’s what I said. I think a pretty good critique of the debates might contain more specifics, but I thought approaching it broadly might be better.

I wonder if these events will ever change. Seems to me we’re stuck with them, at least until a force more influential than the Commission on Presidential Debates takes over. Looking at you, Facebook. 

Rhetoric outlived ancient Athens, Ancient Greece as a whole. Rhetoric outlived Imperial China, Maoism, and is at the table as China develops as a global economic power. Rhetoric outlived the Russian tsars. Rhetoric outlived the Russian Communists. It outlived the Soviet Union. It outlived Rome, as a republic, and an empire. It outlived the Holy Roman Emperor. It outlived the age of imperialism, the Bolsheviks, two world wars, and numerous global conflicts. Rhetoric was alive and well at the formation of the European Union, and is alive and well now when that Union is being questioned. Rhetoric was present at the Continental Congress, and will be around long after the collapse of the United States. 

But where was rhetoric during the Presidential Debates?

Professional rhetoricians, at least on twitter, would rather be the Political Science Auxiliary Club then forward their own ancient, deep art. Rhetoricians linking fact-checking websites, and declaring winners because a policy is better than another one or “would work,” or because a candidate was “lying” seem to indicate that contemporary rhetoricians are not that interested, or proud of their ancient art. At the very least, it indicates that rhetoric has nothing unique or special to say about Presidential debating. More accurately, it shows how much suspicion, mistrust, and doubt even rhetoric’s deepest adherents have about a rhetorical perspective, even given rhetoric’s undeniable power in human affairs. 

To those scholars I ask: Where’s your fidelity? To your own personal political view? To the journalists who say pretty much what you are saying? Or is it to this ancient art that we have dedicated our lives to studying? Where’s your (he)art?

I have been teaching Plato’s dialogue Gorgias in my undergraduate courses, which has me thinking about suspicions about rhetoric’s value. Gorgias is quite comfortable saying that rhetoric is the best of all human arts, because it constitutes their value. Socrates is panicked about locating the “thing” that rhetoric is about: his teaching relies on “thing-ness” or “being” something in order to teach it; this is where the good of something lives. For some reason, we appear to be more comfortable with rhetoric’s detractor than we are with rhetoric’s master teacher. When political events appear, rhetoricians pretend to be political scientists or journalists. We are frightened about what we are, so we rush to “seem” to be something else. What would happen if we occupied our rhetoric being? What would happen if we adopted the perspective of rhetoric as the art of seeming? Of seeming to be? Of positionality? Of crafting the frames of meaning? Nope, wait, time to tweet about political fact-check again. . .

During the debates, rhetoricians become very suspicious of their own art. They talk about the debates in terms of facts, of thing-ness, of good and bad in universal terms. They take on the mantle of the journalist; of the political scientist. Where’s the mantle of the rhetorician? We should know better. We preach that if rhetoric is a knack, a bag of tricks, Socrates is the chief trickster. But when the rubber meets the road, we adopt his critique wholesale in our own public performances.

Most of the year, rhetorical scholarship is ignored. When we have a chance to forward what rhetorical scholarship can say about the dizzying roles of rhetoric, we balk. We become the junior journalist’s society. We become the political science glee club. The history of rhetoric has been one that could be characterized as fighting against positioning rhetoric as a servile art, an art that works to convey the truth, facts, and value of other disciplines. We erase that struggle, that history, when we defer to journalistic opinion in our public statements. 

The distrust in rhetoric runs deep; look at how we treat public speaking courses: best avoided by serious scholars. Most rhetoric scholars today do not have much interest in an idea that is gaining traction globally, the idea of oralcy – a sort of literacy competence for the auditory/oral creation of texts. Public speaking is still nearly universally taught as mastering modalities that would have been easily recognized by anyone from the 18th century. At my university, public speaking instructors fight over the limited number of podiums available, as if this was a requirement for speech instruction like a bunsen burner would be for a chemistry lab. There’s little critical interrogation of the form, or the pedagogy, of this art. And it’s symptomatic across the board. If rhetoricians don’t think that rhetoric is the most important art, or the art that has something unique to say about oral communication, then there’s little hope that others will see rhetorical studies as valuable either. The way we treat our foundation impacts how we are able to advance our view into the public. 

These same scholars who gleefully point out contradictions, fact-check websites, and judge the efficaciousness of a policy option suggested by a candidate also are first in line to complain that rhetoric journals are not cited by other fields.  They wonder why their research is not seen as valuable by historians, sociologists, and others. After all, we are all talking about the very same objects, texts, peoples, and events. Why not collaborate? The reason is that we have no clear foundation. We have no clear first principle. We’ve abandoned it; we don’t think public speaking is a serious course. We think argumentation should be taught by “debate people” on contract lines. We base our art on foundations for other fields: History, literary studies, critical theory. We don’t collaborate our own theories with those ideas, we supplant them.

When you can’t distinguish the unique take your field has on an event that most would agree is at the heart of your discipline, that is internationally broadcast, and that is watched by over 100 million people, you have bigger problems than citations. You fundamentally do not trust your art. You fundamentally are suspicious of the power of your art to stand next to the fields that traditionally have unquestioned value. You fundamentally think that journalism is a better hermeneutic for understanding the debates than the 2,500 year old tradition of studying how deeply human beings depend on words to craft meaningful existence.

Perhaps I’m a bit too sophistic for most reading this, but I really do not understand and will never understand the tectonic divestment we as a field have made from studying the oral production of texts. This is our way in to larger conversations across disciplines; this is our unique take. We are not mere speech teachers (a mantle I really like) but instead we should be the champions of thinking of speech as hermeneutic. Speech is a perspective. Rhetoric is a perspective that lets in certain observations and critiques. Or we can keep re-tweeting fact-checking journalism websites and pointing out “lies” and play journalist, while rolling our eyes each time NPR has a psychologist on to explain persuasion. Our inability to treat our foundational courses seriously is the reason why journalists do not take our field seriously. Our mistrust of our roots is communicated in how we speak about our art, or fail to when the moment is right.

Our fidelity should not be to a party, or parties, or even to the United States. Rhetoric helped build, helped dismantle, and outlasted every great empire the Earth has hosted. It will outlive Trump and Clinton, you and me, the Constitution, and the United States. No art is simultaneously involved in the production and criticism of human affairs at the core like this. Rhetoric is our art. We are the only ones who study it. We should not be so skittish about this powerful force that we adopt a journalistic paradigm when we publicly communicate about rhetorical events. 

Here’s my full analysis which was posted on the great ElectionDebates Website, but some had to be removed. This is the full version of what I wrote: 

Presidential debate scholar Sydney Krause argued that Presidential debates are “joint press conferences.” This seems like an insult to those of us who think debate is an incredibly valuable form of discourse in society. But Krause’s point is not an insult. It is a warning. Krause, as many others after him, have articulated the many elements missing from Presidential debates that are necessary for debate. But the point goes further than simple accuracy. If we treat these events as debates even if they do not contain enough elements to be debates, we risk seeing what we want to, or re-assembling the event to match our expectations of reason and argument. Said in a shorter way, if you think there’s a pattern there, you’ll find one.

It’s not appropriate or productive to consider these events as debates in any formal sense. There’s no productive disagreement, i.e. there is no possibility for either speaker to have any place from which to advance or defend positions because neither is asked to take a position on a controversial issue. The question “Who is best suited to be President?” is not a debatable motion, because it can be answered in a way that avoids any engagement with the answer from the other side. There are no judges. There are no standards for evidence or proof. There’s no formal topic with which to agree or disagree. They cannot be debates, unless we wish to strip out of debates all the elements that make them different from arguing, speech, informing, negotiating, or discussing.

But these are valuable, important events. We do not discount their importance by pointing out they are not debates. The attribution is important; if we call them debates we limit our ability to respond appropriately to the entire spectrum of the event, searching for any utterances we can twist or push into the form of a reason or argument. These forms are too limited for events that do not correspond with argument and debate, and they strip away rich elements of the performance that are critical to our judgement of the candidates. Consider them situations where the candidates are required to produce agonistic rhetoric in the context of what they are being asked in the presence of their opponent. They are not addressing their opponent’s argument in a meaningful sense; they are creating argumentative speech in an unusual context for us to use to judge their ability to be President.

With that perspective, here’s my analysis of the first debate.

Both candidates had difficulty in speaking on two important issues: Framing the debate, i.e. What tools should we use to decide who won? And establishing principles, i.e. here are the things I stand for or ask myself when I’m thinking about Presidential issues. Debaters in this format need to remember it’s not about facts/truth/rightness but more about generating discourse that establishes how you think, reason, and judge. People are watching this, not machines. They will look for moments where they can identify with candidates, seeing their own reasoning present in the rhetoric of the candidate. Identification with how someone expresses reason will always beat factual accuracy in these events.

Clinton was doing well with this until she decided to attack Trump’s business practices. Turning the debate into an attack on Trump allowed him time to make some rational arguments in his comfort zone. Better to keep him fragmented and blaming “politicians” rather than sounding good on his own reasoning for running his business his way. He was not establishing principles or frameworks at all, but placing blame. Clinton’s attack inadvertently allowed him time to generate some rationalizing rhetoric to compete with her tone.

Trump should have spent a lot more time discussing infrastructure and how the US government sells this out via political deals to benefit career politicians. This argument might work pretty well for his supporters, but not in this context.  Trump needs more vision, and more principled explanation as to why he would reform taxes or improve infrastructure in those ways. Too often he blamed the current system when he could be establishing his position better.

On race relations, Trump did well using the phrase “Law & Order” without going into too much detail. Clinton did better here discussing the difficulties of doing police work and providing safety while not violating the rights of the people who live in tough areas. Trump was behind on this discussion talking more about his experiences and less about his judgement. Again, framing and principles, although loose, were more established by Clinton.

The biggest error in the debate was when Lester Holt challenged Trump on the facticity of the Stop and Frisk judgement. Instead, he should have asked Trump his thoughts about the ruling, or if he would agree with the legal reasoning behind such a judgement. This would have helped the audience with judgement a lot more than simply going back and forth on the fact itself. Clinton should have pointed out that this reasoning isn’t fit for someone who is President. One has to reason situationally to be President, she could argue. Trump favors the idea that a businessman’s mode of reason is a one-size-fits-all solution. This can be persuasive, but he needs to be more comparative on judgement to win it.

On security and nuclear weapons, Clinton did a much better job of establishing the principles of how she thinks about bilateral defense treaties, NATO, and nuclear weapons. Trump attacked the Iran treaty, but did not establish his own framework. This was a mistake – he should have set out his own thoughts first. His statement near the end would have been good: “I’m a businessman, not a politician. Here’s how I think.” This helps his statements about politicians being poor thinkers en masse make more sense.

The other topics such as the birther issue and Clinton’s appearance don’t seem as relevant to me as the other issues were, but on those Clinton’s responses were more attacks than anything else. It is probably justified, but a missed opportunity to compare modes of thought between the two people who could serve as President.

Clinton did a better job of generating valuable rhetoric in this debate, so I would declare her the “winner.”