The New York Sophist

Responses to violence against government officials are perfect opportunities to recast the violence of the normal political process as peaceful, non-violent, productive, natural, and normal. Paul Ryan’s response to the shooting of congresspeople engaged in baseball practice is a masterful example of the power of rhetoric to craft a world where there is only one possible response to the event, and that response reifies a world where politics, as they appear in material and social form, are the inevitable natural extension of oh-so-good-and-noble humanity. Such moves risk Burkean debunking. But Ryan, by “converting upwards” is able to transform the normal legal violence of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Government into the only possible oppositional stance toward violence that caring human beings can take. 

Examining the situation with some loose Burkean terms, we can see the scene and the event are perfect for Ryan’s task. Arguably nothing is more perfectly American than Members of Congress practicing baseball at sunrise for an upcoming charity game. The shooter believed he was attacking corrupt elements of the government, eliminating a disease. By choosing this scene and event for his attack, he was obviously attacking America. Scene is an easy one for Ryan to use for his defense of House-based violence as healthy and normal, as opposed to shootouts on baseball diamonds. 

This is seen as not only a national site of amusement, but not a political scene at all – never mind that a former staffer of a congressman who is now an executive for Tyson Chicken was present at the practice. He certainly wasn’t playing baseball. His presence suggests the “normal” operation of the political system, with “insider baseball” present at actual baseball without any sense of irony whatsoever. Ryan points us to a photo of Democrats praying as important for his thoughts today – and why not? The other “team” – literally and figuratively – has put aside its differences in order to support those who were attacked. It’s just a game after all; there are more important considerations than politics/baseball here. 

The agent, another easy pitch across the plate for Ryan. The shooter, we were quickly told, was a rabid supporter of Sanders (who quickly denounced all violence within politics in a nested debunking move par excellence) as well as someone who turned to abuse as a problem-solving tool in his own life. Such a figure is unsympathetic, and clearly not a political radical, a critic of the system, or anything like that. As an opportunist, he believed that if the government would not “listen to reason” they were a problem and should be wrangled into submission. This agent is easily sub-human. Ryan uses this context in order to construct this as an attack on a family, something that we might be able to call the “national family” or “the family members that represent us.” It is brilliant to gesture toward the agent’s history as an abuser toward his family and this attack as automatically casting the congresspeople as “family.” He strongly and persuasively suggests that the House is our family as well.

This is bleeding into purpose now, which Ryan calls “a test.” The purpose of the attack was to test our basic humanity. Are we going to remain human, or strip that humanity away? This brilliant move begs the question of the presence of human caring within national politics, the House of Representatives, or the government: What would such caring look like? Would it be a bill? A rider? Does it leak out of the restrictive formal rules on debate? Ryan is persuasive though because he transcends all of that through the metaphor of “family.” He also puts the congresspeople in league with those who might have suffered from a home invasion. A criminal barged into our home, attacked us, and wants us to respond with violence, or perhaps celebrate violence.

Notice there is no discussion of the agency – a powerful rifle which the video of the shooting indicates – this is no normal hunting rifle. Not much discussion about the weapon has emerged beyond the predictable and over-simplistic smug “I told you so’s” by the NPR liberal set. It is not to Ryan’s advantage at all to discuss this as a shooting – it is an attack. It is a violent attack. In this chamber, we neither use violence, nor do we attack. These are anathema to the work done in Congress. The video captured by mobile phone linked above provides a very convincing account of the attack as being primarily about agency – about guns. The “brave” capitol police engage in a shootout with the perpetrator, and it sounds as if they are losing.

This weapon is a very powerful one and might raise questions about how it was obtained, how someone who had a history of violent behavior obtained it, and what sort of system supports such a combination of events. Instead of a speech about how we must forbid violent people from access to weapons (agent-agency) or how violent people are disturbed and require our sympathy and help (agent-purpose) we get an attack on a family that forwards the best of human feeling and thought (act-scene). All other considerations (agency, agent, etc) fall by the wayside – which allows Ryan and his colleagues conduct their own “smuggled in” violence by the normal, textual means of legislation. 

But Ryan’s simplification into this as violence – pure and simple – is all he needs in order to convince us that we have been attacked, or that our family has been attacked. This is a test. Will we pass the test? Will we continue to hold on to our humanity?

Ryan says that nobody loses their humanity when they step into that chamber. A cursory view of American legislation might confirm that its a humanity-stripping chamber for others around the world. Perhaps it is the only safe spot in order to protect one’s humanity. Perhaps they know what humanity should be?

Ryan does not really escape the problems of debunking here. If politics is the polar opposite of violence, that violence has no place in the political in any conditions (a sentiment supported by Bernie Sanders in his comments as well) then those who are not served by political discourse, or who perceive themselves excluded from political discourse, have a self-completing alternative: Violent action. This is rhetorically justified by the violent revolution this country cites as its founding moment. This is the inevitable price of smuggling in violence under another name while denouncing violence of one flavor as violence in toto. 

Ryan’s debunking of violence opens up a very clear and distinctive spot for violence in politics, especially when laws and policies are violent – from subsidies to health care to military spending, we see Foucault was right, “Politics is war by other means.” Without that admission, violence must be smuggled back into the House chamber under other terminology, further fueling a narrative of violent action. If the political system is violent but lies about that; if it won’t listen; if it has no place for those who perceive this as the truth, they will happily don the jerseys of “team violence” and engage in acts like we saw yesterday. We have a “home grown terrorist” problem, as the liberals like to call it – but this problem is one of a rhetorical relationship to violence. We must come to terms with speech as violence, with politics as violence. Ryan bought us more time to delay this confrontation, or perhaps he made us all feel comfortable in the burning building. After all it’s only a dry heat. Let’s continue or work as a family to perpetuate the best humanity has to offer. 

Easing my way into summer often comes with a return to PC gaming. Been spending a lot of hours messing around with various games, graphics settings, and improving my machine here and there to make everything work the way I want. 

There’s also a bit of thought or a suggestion that perhaps we should offer a gaming course in our department. There are a bunch of them out there, and they look pretty good. 

There are a few different ways to think about gaming from an academic point of view. The most obvious (that is the ones that don’t need a lot of articulation in the defenses) are for computer science departments, graphic design, programming, and the like. The other would be to use games for economic or sociological/anthropological work. For example, studying the “gold farmers” in World of Warcraft has been done many times and intersects this video games and their transformative impact on society bit. Psychology would fit into this as well. 

But there are some other perspectives that we are just now starting to articulate and take in which sound to me like good course orientations:

1. Video games as literature

2. Video games as culture

3. Video games as argument

The first one I don’t have a lot of interest in, and I wonder if English departments will take on. I know there are a couple of books out there that try to develop the video games as literature point of view, while bending a lot of the assumptions about what literature is/can be. They take inspiration and some approaches from the move to “film as literature” that most English departments have accepted. I think the burn is slow on this one. 

The second and third are the rhetorical perspective. If culture is considered to be a worldview that is sustained through performances and practices, articulated and re-articulated by the participants, then I think you have a nice rhetoric course. The rhetoric of video games would investigate how games present themselves, how players present themselves to one another and themselves, and how games function to hold up a certain approach to other worldviews (such as when a game is blamed for inspiring a violent act in the world). 

The third interests me the most and I think that very little has been said or investigated on how games function as arguments or at least as persuasion. Not totally distinct from the second approach, but distinct enough to warrant some comparison and contrast with the argumentation literature out there. Argumentation studies is far too formal in their approach to be a total buy-in from me, but it might open up a lot of different ways of thinking about games as more than consumer entertainment objects. 

As far as what would be covered, there are a lot of readings that could be assigned. There are a couple of documentaries on video games that would be good to watch, pointing out to the students how the films define or “place” video games by how they treat them in the film. Then there’s playtime. I feel like it wouldn’t be out of the question to have students open Steam accounts and have to buy and play through a few games as coursework. Playing through the games and experiencing them seem necessary. Not sure how you would get around it. Science needs a lab, literature needs texts, and we’d need to have games. The sum total of games that need to be bought would be under the cost of most textbooks for a typical course, so I don’t feel too bad about such a requirement.  The question is which ones should we take on? 

This course might be fun to design, but this summer I’m working on another course project as well, actually perhaps two courses, so this is just starting to incubate. I think that as video games become more and more a part of daily life their inclusion in the curriculum will be a certainty. What won’t be certain is the amount of thought or consideration teachers have put into such courses.

We’re done with the USU Nationals in Denver and I have a few questions:

What sort of competition is this? What is it that we are competing to be good at doing? Or saying? Or being? Is this more like baseball or art? Dance or track? Competitive cooking shows or American Idol? What’s the best metaphor?

How can you keep alive the distance between act and habit in debate competitions? Said another way, how can you reward the good by naming it “good” without the belief that the label stays no matter what you say next? 

anti-intellectualism is a central part of the average reasonable voter’s world in this moment. We can’t help but replicate some of that. Is this ok? Should we work to exclude it? 

What is the understanding of evidence and proof for the debate participant, and is it stable?

The public is missing. Do we care? 

My last post was about the difference between an administrator and a teacher, and how easily those things elide into one another. After reading some comments on it, I was returned in my mind to my days as a high school teacher in Texas. Thinking about those days reminded me of an older idea, an idea that the goal of administrative rhetoric is to crowd out, freeze, and shut down an alternative rhetoric based on teaching as the governing discourse of the institution. This is done through substituting the tone of institutional rhetoric for the tone of communitarian discourse.

There are deeper connections here, as I suspected there would be somewhere in the recesses of my thinking. I once was a high school teacher, and there is a very compelling communitarian rhetoric that high school administrators use to get you to feel guilty about not joining them in the paperwork empire they are trying to construct. For most school administrators must secure their position by creating some perceived value to their position. I would say most school administrators are using their current position to be promoted to some other position, or they are satisfied (and surprised) that they were able to nail down the job they have, so they try to justify their position’s vital role through the creation of a lot of extra work for the teachers.

They co-opt communitarian rhetoric by establishing the work they are doing as benefiting the entire school and all students. They honestly believe most of what they are saying since they conceptualize the school and the students as the same thing on a plane of statistics about graduation and state test marks broken down on every metric you can possibly imagine. You can see exactly how any identity intersection is doing on a test or with graduation or what have you. The forms, the work that is created for teachers to do as administrators, is conceptualized as more important than teaching since it is broad, easily visualized, and applicable to every possible identity that the students could have.

Contrast this view with the act of teaching, which is generally out of view, difficult to enumerate or craft into statistics, very personal, very contextual – it has a very quick expiration date (most of what worked one day with one class will fail with another class on that same day or later). It’s often a product of time, attitude, and moment – and the teacher’s practice in the art of catching the situation and responding with a “teaching attitude.”

This is tough to do and requires a lot of energy and attention. Such things are eroded by dividing teacher attention and reducing teacher energy by refusing to give them the time in their teaching situation (class period, classroom, course, etc) to practice this art. Teaching, under the dominant discourse of the administration, is the opposite of “teaching” since what is productive and valuable for the school is determined by the co-opted communitarian rhetoric based on visibility, intersectional statistics, and ease of categorization into numerical values.

This is how the teacher is made to feel bad doing the work of teaching instead of doing the work of the school. Effective teachings difficulty in being pinned down or measured, its personal nature, its hard-to-replicate effervescence in the moment with the particular student and class makes it hard for others who were not present in the classroom to appreciate it or even name the value of it. Often presence in the classroom doesn’t capture it either.

The obsession to measure teaching through communitarian arguments based on things that are easy to count covers up the elided claim that what is good for the school is good for the student. There can never be a “good for the student” without teachers who are encouraged to disappear into the eddies and pools of the current and address what is swirling around them now. We would do good to encourage those who have an affinity for the art of grappling with uncertainty and making something good out of it for those joining us downstream.

It’s a hard rhetoric to fight. Where I work, professors regularly assign large papers and constant journaling and quizzing as if the production of texts was direct evidence that a class was worthy or challenging to the students. We are so panicked about how good teaching is determined that we latch on to the administrative rhetoric of the institution as a metaphor for our students. We replicate the paperwork nightmare that is placed on us under the language that this is for the benefit of all of us. We tell our students this is beneficial – a dodge from the harder question of determining what, in an hour long class meeting, would actually be beneficial to do.

There is no comfortable rhetoric of what good teaching looks like outside of being a strict adherent to the administrative, productive, institutional model. This is comfortable because we have tons of papers to grade and tons of work to chide the students for doing poorly. It makes sense to the rest of the world what teaching is when it looks like this.
What about a rhetoric of uncertainty and indeterminism? What about the teaching rhetoric where what is focused on is potential and creativity rather than progress and mastery? What if the total sum of the elements of the course was not a boundary, not a soccer field one must run around in until exhausted, but a diving platform, a place where one can prepare oneself to leap off, twist however they want, and safely enter the water, emerge, and contemplate doing it again? Questions of metaphor, how to represent in rhetoric a situation of uncertainty and instability, are difficult yet productive for a teaching discourse that exists on its own terms. 

On the train headed to the Lafayette debates, sponsored by the French Embassy and GW in lovely Washington, D.C. A different sort of debate competition that I have enjoyed helping the students prepare for.

During the run-up to all of this, as I have all semester, I have been interrogating why I am so frustrated and short these days with the subject of debating. I’ve nearly lost all interest in it as it seems like an event very loosely connected to the university. There’s little thinking, a lot of copying of speeches, and zero scholarship either going into or coming out of BP debate these days. But the root of my frustration is with something else. I think that I am frustrated because I have confused administering a program with teaching.

When running a large-ish BP program, one mostly takes on the role of a program administrator. You book hotels, tickets, you pay fees, you order checks cut, you know some of the accounting people better than faculty who study similar things to you who are in departments you never go to. You constantly check up on students and ensure they are going to show up, that they brought what they needed, all of that sort of thing. BP with its emphasis on quick preparation and familiarity with how to approach motions within BP (as opposed to how to approach motions in many argumentative forums) discourages teaching in terms of no prep, no laptops, and no advance limitations to the motions.

Where’s the teacher? BP discourages the teacher and pumps up the coach-administrator, who is a figure that makes sure the teams are lined up, the judge obligation is filled, and that his or her teams have a procedure down to construct winning arguments based on the structure of a speech or a motion regardless of the subject matter or content of the debate. The teacher becomes a “chief strategist” someone who maybe has walked that road before (won a lot of important debates) or has some insight into what wins and losses. This is the equivalent of teaching a literature course based on word frequency or number of adjectives used in the book, things like that.

I enjoyed debate because I enjoy teaching, and current practices have worked to eliminate the possibility of teaching from BP. Instead you want someone to offer processes that can be easily mastered and frequently deployed to find the right thing to say on a motion (rather than the best, which is often the goal of university courses, determined by the standards of a field).

What would teaching look like for debate?

I think praxis is what is needed here. The right amount of theory on argument, audience, persuasion and the like that then is critiqued and modified based on practices with audiences who evaluate those arguments. This is very broad, however, compare it to what most people think is happening at BP competitions: The purification of argument in a larger project of being right about issues. There’s little praxis here; the right way to argue has been determined and is reinforced via the hegemonic practices of the CA system and the lack of accessible motion writing norms (as well as the absence of any political will to develop such a thing). 

I think this competition will be a good test for me as I really enjoyed walking through some theory and other readings with my students, spending hours talking to them about different arguments and approaches rather than booking a bunch of hotels or going over some YouTube video to extract the structural norms of victory. Instead, I had an opportunity to read some new texts with my students and re-discover some favorites. Teaching is what attracted me to debating at the start of this journey, and my confusion of debate with program administration, or being a coach of some kind, I somehow confused with this art.

Administration is important, but not if it’s the majority of your interaction with debating. Administration also includes the formulaic approach of figuring out strategies of winning, as opposed to strategies of how to explain a difficult text. Audience is key too: Without it, there can be no debate or argument pedagogy that intersects debate with contemporary or 20th century argumentation scholarship.