The New York Sophist

A Lot is going on right now for me this September and it’s all rotating around the idea of the future of rhetoric.

Photo by Nikolai Lehmann on Unsplash

Got a very interesting call for papers for the journal Informal Logic about a special issue on this topic.

Got an email from the President of the University about downsizing and the future of the school. It’s not rosy! There will be some examination of some efficiency of programs it seems.

I’ve also put in for a position somewhere new, and thinking about how that will look next year and beyond. Will this be a good idea?

I also feel my teaching is quite stale and needs to be upgraded for the future. Had a great lunch yesterday with someone interested in graduate work, but not sure what discipline. In thinking about what I could have them read to see if speech communication derived rhetoric is a good fit, everything I was thinking of is 40 plus years old.

The NCA journals don’t help either – they are full of old ideas, or ideas that are somewhat adjacent to the study of how words mean such as the construction of race and gender. Fascinating things to study, but it’s not the field (although some wish it were as it sounds so much cooler to be a “scholar of race” than a rhetorician).

I’m definitely wondering about the future of the university and professors in general too. What’s the point of bringing up big questions and cool readings if the end result is to just be a sideshow on the way to a cubicle job somewhere? I feel like I work in the entertainment division of a job training platform that is shifting to be more online and work from home.

What is the future of all this? I am definitely not going to figure this out on a Tuesday morning in October. Today I am going to work on essays and class, and then maybe this evening do some reading around for fun.

My life has radically changed since I was last blogging. I moved to the suburbs, got a dog, a partner, a car, and I’m up before the sun.

My partner gets up early for work so I get up pretty early too. I think it’s nice to have some time in the morning together.

As far as the dog goes, she just loves to play. Lots of trouble housebreaking her but she’s learning. She’s just a dog, albeit a smart one.

This video is from earlier in the summer when she was a few months younger but she still loves to do this.

This environment has been very productive for me and my writing, as well as getting a better camera, and a voice notes app on the phone. I also swapped out to an iPhone against my better judgement and it seems to be going fine.

Big changes are big no doubt, but it was just the right kind of reset for me.

Looks like I’m back on BlueHost typing away.

Watching a little football today and got nostalgic for my old WordPress site. So here we are again, three years later, doing it.

I have a number of substack posts that I might import but then again why? I will probably just rewrite them with some edits and new thoughts that have come to me since those posts were made.

There really isn’t much substitute for this simple interface is there? We just keep trying to innovate on perfection. Blogging is blogging, and this is really it. Why did I ever leave?

A Rhetorician’s View

A quick editorial note:

I am planning on moving away from Substack for a number of reasons: Their unabashed support of anti-trans, pro-Nazi, pro-fascist discourse is one, another is their questionable use of writer and reader data, and a third is the high fees they charge writers when you choose to subscribe.

The newsletter will move to its new home on News of the Day, a small, public-interest company that publishes a newsletter with low overhead and no Substack issues like listed above. They are a much more amenable site politically and much cheaper for you if you choose to subscribe. Here is the link. If you sign up you get a $3 dollar credit you can use to subscribe to any newsletter on the site. I will cross-post here until the subscriptions on the site expire, then I will shut this down.

I finally got around to watching Joe Biden’s State of the Union for 2024. My comments are divided. At first, I made a number of observations about the rhetorical function of the State of the Union, then slowly moved into more specifics about President Biden’s performance. I feel that the older I get and the more of these speeches I watch, the more I believe it’s vital to consider what role we want for these speeches in American life.

The first consideration is how this speech impacts our view of discourses in general. Conflating opposition with the normal political is “debate for debate’s sake,” one of the worst positions one could have on defending debate.

It has much better ends than that, but such ends are not upheld well when we believe our biggest national rhetorical moments are moments of “national debate.” I think there were a lot of things in the State of the Union (SOTU) that Biden delivered that encouraged this viewpoint of opposition. The rhetoric and style of his address is good for him, good for his support in his base, but perhaps bad for national understanding and appreciation of the power and necessity of debate. It also raises the question of what the function of the SOTU is and should be.

Watching the SOTU this year and knowing the Swedish Prime Minister was there, I couldn’t help but think how weird this speech must have been from his point of view. Something like this in the Swedish Parliament would most likely be confusing – beyond just crossing the line, most of the members of Parliament wouldn’t even think of such a speech being delivered. It’s simply not the “politics” of the chamber. Outside of that space, campaign discourse is different and more familiar to Americans interested in politics. As we all know (or at least regular readers of me know), rhetoric is always aimed for and evaluated by the audience.

This means the State of the Union, as Biden and his staff put it together, met the appropriate requirements for audience expectation while also addressing the “universal audience” (Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric), trying their best not to appeal to the specific audience but instead meet the standard of situational encounter: If someone from that place and time (2024 America) encountered these arguments and reasons, they would find them difficult to deny. What this means for me is that the discourse triggers the traditional Burden of Rejoinder as opposed to the laugh, the discount, or the “what the hell is he talking about?” The universal audience is a very important but very simple bar to reach.

Here’s where the intervention can come in: What do Americans want, what should they want from the State of the Union? Do they want a political showdown, a stump speech, a call to arms for a political campaign? Or do they want something basic, something more along the lines of the bare-bones Constitutional requirement?

Here’s the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 3:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient

Without any consideration for the time and place and history of where we are now, what this seems to me as a rhetorician (someone who teaches people how to speak and argue well with their voice, at least, that’s what I think the field is about) is that the speaker would be well advised to split the address into an analysis, based on the best information from the secretaries, the GAO, and other intelligence and information services what the conditions are – a lay of the land of the U.S. and where we are this year as compared to other years. The second half of the speech then would be the President’s view of what priorities and issues should be that will be taken up.

Over time this has become altered, and we can’t avoid it: Now it’s a description of the country and the State of the Union and how my administration made it so great. If there are issues, it’s because of the parties’ opposites and their mistaken actions in the past. The ideas for the future are reduced to Vote for me or my party to ensure that we won’t go down that road again.

Some of this seems to be informative in the way that we might (incorrectly) teach it in our Public Speaking courses at the university or at the high school level. But Biden (as well as the last few Presidents giving these) make them showpieces of two-party politics rather than something that could be a bit better for the people instead of the people-as-split-into-two-parties.

The audience is not the Congress, the Justices, and the guests; it’s quite clearly the American people around the world. It’s also the people around the world who are interested in US policy and US vision/direction for the future. Any statement by the President about the “state” of the union, what conditions exist now, and what narrative of conditions exist. That viewpoint cannot be anything other than an argument aimed at an audience, for a purpose – that purpose being to be the reason (Data) to support the policy to come, the actions (Claim) that the President believes to be the expedient and necessary steps that the Government should pursue. The speech will serve as a number of moments of reason (Warrant) that will hopefully pop out to the audience.

The best example of this is when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden to shout out the name of Laken Riely – Biden responded by holding up a pin and expressing sympathy as someone who lost children himself. This places him in a position of understanding. Then he tried to articulate an argument that was along the lines of the problem not being immigration but the current border policy. He tried to explain that it’s not that tempting to pay a human trafficker $8,000 if your asylum hearing will only be a six-week affair. Something snappier here would have been a better expression of warrant since warrants are ironically best expressed when they are not exposed but apprehended: Laken Riely was killed by an illegal, someone who was here because traffickers operate in and around our poor border laws. Cut the time for a hearing, you cut the traffickers and you cut the opportunity for illegals to enter our country. Desperate people will support desperate measures; cut the desperation by reducing the hearing time to six weeks. This is how we support Americans and those who want to become Americans.

My wording here is just a rough suggestion, but the point is that more explanation in a SOTU is not necessarily a good thing – less might be better as listeners fill in the gaps as warrants do the work for us. The strategy here can be really good – those warrants, when apprehended and added by the listener – can help constitute the audience as American instead of supporters of one party or another. The SOTU can be used to discover these – an interesting project would be to pursue what Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca suggest, which is to analyze within the context and place and time of the argument what the universal audience of that time period must have been – then you can collect temporally relevant moments of audience construction and see how the appeal to “Americans” has changed a bit over time. This could be a very important part of the SOTU for those who are interested in the question: what do Americans want or need?

Biden gave too much information sometimes. He’s at his best when sparring with the audience instead of the more poetic metaphors he had in the speech. I would suggest that a comparison of less specific financial data and more “plain speech” would be better. Phrases like “when the knife was held to the neck of democracy” (referring to January 6th) don’t hit as well as phrases like the “American comeback story.” I think that it should be altered to serve Biden’s perspective rather than some high-level view of how to talk about America.

The trouble with speechwriters is that they can’t help themselves. These are the words of the President, so they should be Presidential words. The people who study this stuff in terms of working in speechwriting want to connect (or be the creator of) a great turn of phrase for the history books. What they don’t realize is that the phrases that stick and hang out in our minds long after a presidential address are composed not for posterity but from the figure of the president as he is and the time and place of the address. The best lasting rhetoric is that aimed at the audience, which can only be the audience as they are. An ethical speaker can invoke the universal audience to show that specific audience how good they could be, how the best reasoning is, and how the best narrative could be told. Through this, the SOTU could become more than another campaign stump speech. It could be instead a moment of the constitution of American identity, not in a whiggish way but a universal audience way, one where listeners could see a model of rhetoric that encourages them not just what facts to believe about the country but what to believe about the identity of being American. This might be the best way to answer the question of what Americans want and need.

The peroration was traditional: “I see a future” – not much to remark on here other than the traditional recognition of the close of a formal speech. Moving through a number of visions to the central thing that is composed of those moments but is higher than them is something that’s difficult for any speechwriter to avoid.

The exordium was great. Referencing FDR coming to Congress to address them at an unprecedented time was a great start but wasn’t well supported through repetition and return. Like the peroration, the exordium needs a building moment of what factors exist that call this comparison to mind. From there, the comparison can be a frame for how we, as Americans, should see ourselves – like the Americans that FDR addressed during the Depression and the start of World War 2.

If you have other thoughts about the SOTU, please leave a comment. I am happy to discuss this or other SOTUs throughout history.

We are in the midst of hiring, and it’s a lot of work. It seems like all my time has evaporated between this and trying to make some very new approaches to teaching (which aren’t satisfying). The approaches to teaching I’m trying are based on a deep distrust of my intuitive ways of approaching the classroom. At least I’m gaining some confidence in pedagogy this backward-ass way. An example of this is that I suspected students would be more animated and engaged if they had quizzes. The students last semester in my one terrible class who did nothing, seemed to be unmoored in a very literal way, unable to propel themselves through the class in any way, literal playthings of the waves (the other), spinning out. The imposition of quizzes and other such devices I thought to be “lazy teaching” have stimulated my new class, but they come with a heavy dose of indignation – but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to student motivation, can they? More to come as the experiments continue. The best classes I’ve had this semester are the ones where I only have a topic in mind, haven’t prepped that much, and roll with the comments. These seem to be moving the needle, against what I feel should be happening logically.

Recent conversations have me thinking about one of my old projects – defining the anti-institutional, anti-establishment professor. The first question is: Can it be done? I think of Gramsci’s writings about institutional intellectuals and their limits. They cannot turn on the institutions that gave them the legitimacy (the confidence) to offer systemic (dialectical) critique. Recent random and unconnected conversations about rhetoric have led me to think this is possible.

First is the conversation with an old student about the function of rhetoric within contemporary Marxist ideas. In this conversation, rhetoric seemed to have no grounding (which I think is appropriate; it has no method, no substance [See Burke, Grammar of Motives])other than what we posit for it. That positing requires a kind of strange confidence or perhaps the abandonment of these institutional or establishment norms of what a scholarly field must have. The issue was the discussion of class, which is difficult for many people to accept. Still, perhaps that is because we try to argue for class as an extant thing, not the result of the perspective of dialectical analysis.

The second was offhand remarks in a meeting indicating the Dean expressed the opinion that the students “do not know what rhetoric is.” I agree, for I, too do not know what it is. This doesn’t mean that I cannot teach it, extol its virtues, use it for analytical purposes, investigate it, use it as a means of investigation, ad nauseum. This is another way that the norms of the institution/establishment creep into a place they should not be. These norms are convenient for the institution; they are a massive limit on what we can do/say/become by interacting with rhetoric, which remains ephemeral. The practice of defining rhetoric (or argument) is a great one not because we get it right but because we have to defend it and show that our definition is a good one, even though the objections are evergreen – one would always have to face up to the commitments one is making without intent when putting forward a definition of rhetoric or argument. This is rhetoric.

Likewise, we can take the position (unpopular as it is) that rhetoric and argument are perspectives that pop discourse into various configurations with consequences, rules, appropriate moves, etc. If you call a discourse an argument, it must meet specific obligations. If you call it a discussion, those obligations might evaporate. So, the next level is to claim the rhetorical perspective allows one to take the discourse of any field and blur it in such a way. For example, psychology is a perspective, and biology is a perspective, they can both engage with certain phenomena, but in the end, we get to determine which perspective is the one we want for that particular phenomenon at that particular time and context.

A third: I received a major revision decision on a piece I wrote quite a while ago about debating, where a reviewer suggested that I take a more “rhetorical perspective” in the piece. This is striking to me as I thought I was doing that. This suggests that one can never rhetoric enough. That there is always more space to do rhetoric. But what does this reader want me to do? What is it to “rhetoric more” in an essay? Perhaps it means to forward the arbitrary connections made essential? Maybe it means emphasizing the unreal/very real nature of perspective (That which we call debate becomes solid)? Perhaps it means to show that judgment is always open and alive, only closed when rhetoric (always open and alive) convinces us that it’s over. I’m not quite sure, but I haven’t re-read my essay yet since I just got the decision a day ago.

I’m wondering now whether or not this commitment – the anti-institutional/establishment professor is my solution to the panic that often takes over many rhetoric professors and scholars, so much so that they try to be “something other” – they claim to be political scholars, film scholars, they go get law degrees, they seek out political and other identities by the bucketful simply because they cannot accept the paradox of substance. There’s so much panic among rhetoricians to become other, reminding me of Gadamer’s warning that the humanities need to stop desperately clinging to social science’s values and assessment tools. We should embrace non-understanding, but I wonder if that is possible from an anti-institutional perspective. I think that the relationship must be explored next. Desperate grasping for a solid identity is related to being unmoored. Sailing requires replacing the idea of being on solid grounding with the pitch and roll of the sea.

For now, I’m quite happy to have the same conversation again and again with communication students: What is rhetoric? What is argumentation? These questions are evergreen. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that anymore. Maybe the questions are escape routes from the truth constituted by the dialectical relationship between study and the university. It’s constituting, like any system of reason, more than it should, and if it remains unexamined, we lose more than we gain. Now that I’m at the end of this short writing, I’m starting to think there might be a better term or identity for this issue, but it might take a while to generate or find it. Nautical metaphors? Back to cooking? Nothing seems to be satisfactory right now, but isn’t that my argument in this writing?