The New York Sophist

Thoughts on Dank Brandon’s talk last night

Today’s Playlist

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Last night was the State of the Union, which over the decades has become a real political bellwether, a political ritual, a symbolic health-check of the administration politically, and a listing of accomplishments and future plans. It’s not an informative speech anymore, if it ever was.

It is Constitutionally required!

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; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

This says nothing about doing it after the new year, or at the start of each Congress, or even about it being one event that is a speech. It’s wild to think that what we have now is based on this requirement and really doesn’t understand the assignment. Annoyingly, it sort of goes beyond the requirements and shows off a bit too much.

In the video you can see my live reaction to the various things Joe Biden says and Sarah Huckabee Sanders as well. I thought I would write something up summarizing my views and maybe offering some more framing for how I feel, and I figure I should post this today right after the speech instead of on my normal Thursday posting time.

• The State of the Union is a much more powerful phrase than we think. When the President speaks, he or she is stating the union, i.e. the Union is only a creation of discourse. We can read this not as a description of an extant reality of the “United States,” but a necessary utterance that continues the existence of the state, by being “stated.” Kenneth Burke: “Any selection of reality is a deflection of reality.” It is also a constitution of reality, pun intended.

• That being said, the appeal of Biden and contemporary Democrats to the importance of “facts” really harmed the power of the speech last night. Instead of cadences that return to values or principles that can empower individuals go to speak to others in their daily lives about why they support or like President Biden, they just have fragments of weird policies that have been repeated by administration foot soldiers in the media today (“35 dollar insulin for seniors,” “quadruple tax buy backs,” etc). This doesn’t help get people to alter their attitudes; this raw material can be used to make any argument because they lack any “inertia” or emotional valence.

• Biden could have constructed the entire speech around the importance of dignity, and the particular American tradition of upholding all types of dignity. This would have been a powerful value term that he could have returned to in every part of the speech. Cadence outweighs data.

• Finally, Biden is a great speaker when he’s on script. Sadly he gets super into it and super confident and departs, and his well runs dry on tropes. He’s repetitive and old sounding when he’s off script (“Folks,” “Guess what,” etc). Sadly I learned finish the job is official messaging; whoever came up with that should be fired.

Here’s how Biden should have arranged it:

Exordium

New Congress, but same story – we always work together here to do what America does best – create and protect dignity.

I’ve been here more than anyone just about but tonight I am more optimistic than ever about what’s to come. (this was near the end but is definitely exordia stuff).

Through bipartisanship we can work to ensure American dignity economically, personally, and for the people of the world who want to live free.

Narratio

Each accomplishment should be phrased in terms of dignity.

infrastructure – the union steelworkers found jobs with dignity, and the infrastructure allows us to be proud of our country and have a strong economy that returns dignity to each family with money in the bank and food on the table.

instead, Biden did this:

1. There was a massive problem that was horrible

2. We (who is this we? Administration? Federal government? who?) passsed a law with a complicated long name

3. This law was revolutionary in size/scope/historical importance, etc. It’s one of a kind and never been done before

4. Simultaneously, this law is most loved because it contains common sense provisions that even those opposed to it love.

5. Here are three things it did

6. Now we need to finish the job

This is terrible compared to talking about what dignity means, giving some anecdotes, then talking about how a bill or policy serves dignity. Then we can return to that value and show how the policy delivered on american dignity. Then we can suggest where to go forward from there.

I saw it as three types: Economic, Individual, and International dignity

Economic: Infrastructure and jobs

Individual: Dobbs response, LBGTQ, COVID 19, Cancer research, and police brutality. The Tyree Nichols segment was very powerful and a great coda for this section. His stoic parents were a powerful symbolic proof.

International: Working with China, Helping Ukraine, and promoting democracy (shout out to Thomas Caruthers).

Partitio

“My administration has had remarkable success through unprecedented legistation that could have only been accomplished through bipartisan negotiation and differences. Coming to the table and working together to make sure all Americans are served properly, fairly, and with dignity is what my administration is about.”

Confirmatio

The evidence is for dignity – not billions of dollars where our eyes glaze over and we get data fatigue. Make cadence-driven arguments about the status of dignity, the vision for dignity, and what was done to help American dignity in that particular flavor. Then discuss ideas for what is coming next. Get the audience excited. Facts are not exciting. They are like cans of paint compared to a hung canvas. That’s the difference. Use the paint; make something!

Refutatio

Here’s where Dank Brandon came out – happy to make the speech an exchange with the hecklers. Did he mean to bait them? Was this part of the strategy? It sure looks like it. Marjorie Taylor Green and others will take the bait because they understand that supporters like what they do and detractors never will. So her shouting back at the President looks bad to those who are Democrats, and good to most Republicans.

There were some moments where he appealed to the elusive “They,” “They said it could never be done,” “it’s bad to bet against America,” and such. Overall probably the strongest section of the speech.

Peroration

Full of exordium material, this is where the people who had a cancer surviving kid and the others who lost someone to opioid addiction could have been used. “This is what we work to prevent; this little girl is America’s future. The solutions and policies here tonight are only a plan, and won’t be real unless we all work together toward making a better America, one where everyone can enjoy what this great country provides.”

These are just a few thoughts, let me know in the comments what you thought and please watch the video above!

What I listened to in January.

Last Weeks Tunes

I thought I’d start adding my music listening data to the posts to give a bit of context to what’s surrounding me when I’m working. And I have been writing a ton, reading a ton, and making curriculum a ton. It might have been a good and terrible idea to reboot all my courses this term with fresh readings and new assignments not to mention new technology.

I was super stressed about all this at first, but now that I’m in the thick of it I just realize that I have to read and write constantly – new teaching notes and old pieces I haven’t thought about directly in a while. While doing this and preparing my notes for class, I vividly remember some night after a seminar at the Holiday Inn bar directly across the street from the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. There in the dead of night, one of my professors, Henry was talking to us about what’s on everyone’s mind – dissertation work.

“The worst thing isn’t the dissertation at all,” Henry said, “It’s coming back to a piece that was central to your work to teach it a few years later, having a read of a bit of it, pausing, looking up, and saying to yourself, ‘I got this so wrong.’”

I think this is a sign of health. People who continuously assign, defend, and talk about their dissertation work haven’t moved on. People who realize the dissertation is just another school project take it in stride. It worked for the situation it was meant to serve, and now we’ve moved on to other things.

Of course this still stings when I read favorite bits of essays and chapters from well-loved books and then say “Wow this is so much deeper/better/critical than I first gave it credit for.” This is truly one of the joys of teaching; returning to the same text for another long drink and realizing you can never read the same text twice.

Thinking about how Little Thinking Goes into Teaching in Higher Ed

It’s Tuesday, and classes for the spring term start tomorrow. I work at an institution where teaching is such an afterthought that I still do not know my schedule. I suppose this should not be connected to such a large claim as “teaching is such an afterthought,” but in honor of rhetoric and the sophistic ethics and values I try to live by, I thought I would try to create this mountain while surrounded by traces of moles.

I think that teaching quality has little to do with the time of day and the classroom you are assigned. But this kind of thinking is dangerous. It permits one to determine what can be tossed aside and what can be centered. This is not only egotistical, but dangerous in terms of the desire of the professor.

“Desire” in this essay will be read by regulars to this blog in the Lacanian sense. This is not what I mean. I am thinking of desire in this essay in Buddhist terms – that which must be eliminated (Buddhism uses the word ‘overcome’ in English for this, but I am not certain of the Pali word). Perhaps it cannot be eliminated but it must be pushed to the back.

The moon is not bothered by the clouds that pass across it. Something like this is from a koan. I have written a couple of essays and tried to write many more about the value of the koan, that puzzle which will shut itself off forever if addressed with western reason (“logic” or “propositional thinking”). This koan encourages us to realize something that can only be spoken about and thought about at the same time.

There is little that is clear about what should go on in a classroom. The desire to have a clear, organized, results-oriented course with measurable outcomes can overdetermine the class. Like so many clouds, they can obscure our attention from the moon. We miss everything if we can only see something, only attend to one thing or the interaction of one thing with what we expect to see or understand.

University administrators, like phrenologists, alchemists, and those who try to create perpetual motion machines, encourage us to miss the point exactly this way. They focus so much on results they would rather there not be a process. So many of them reveal their horrible nature when they express, at the end of a spring term, how wonderful the campus is without the presence of students. “Oh!” they exclaim, “How perfect is the body without all those messy organs!” University administrators prefer the taxidermy museum to the zoo, primarily because it is so still and organized. Whether it offers understanding about animals, well, sure it does! We’ll figure out some way to figure that out. But for now, it’s open, clean, organized, and quiet.

Knowing the time of day, the days, the room – all are part of the larger teaching organism, and of no interest to those who administrate the university. As long as there is an instructor-of-record, who cares? That can be done at any point in the process, including apparently the first day.

Things have never been good where I work, but it’s incredible just how far they continue to tumble. Convinced they can create a perpetual motion machine, university administrators tinker all day and into the night with it while faculty stand by and wonder what the machine is meant to do, other than power itself eternally.

What’s missing is process. A koan, like teaching, is something that is all process, no result. If there is a result, it’s that a process has been indicated, and that process isn’t burdened by desire. All things are valuable to a process orientation. The university results-orientation doesn’t include process at all. Did the course run? Were grades submitted on-time? Everything is fine then.

The afterthought is process and process is really what teaching is. A process of figuring things is my best definition today. We bring in readings, practices, and conversations to the figuring, and then the students are released to continue figuring and improving those methods as they move through life. The afterthought model of teaching – where basics are basics, just show up and give some assignments – is probably the reason higher education is a dead industry that doesn’t realize it has died, wandering and wailing in the places it used to live, occasionally giving someone chills; waking them up wide-eyed.

This post wound up in a very different place than where I started. Perhaps “afterthought” is part of the figuring we should be doing ourselves. Can we do student evaluations a year or two after the class has ended as well?

The utterance and its relation to belief

I spent a lot of time watching these nomination speeches and votes in the House and found none of the speeches particularly compelling or interesting from the perspective of a sophist.

There’s not a lot to teach here, but one comment that Kevin McCarthy said after vote six really caught my attention:

“We have 90% of the votes,” McCarthy added. “I’ve never seen a body where 10% is going to control the 90%. It just doesn’t happen that way.”

This is such an incredibly wrong argument, and like all incredibly wrong arguments, it depends on the context to find it oh so wrong. Sophistry is the art of engaging argumentation and reason from the perspectives of the situation, the audience, and what counts as reason in the moment. Reason, often touted as a safe harbor, often depends on the wind and waves, and can offer varying degrees of safety. To be sure we are in a good place, we need a large resource of questions to pursue when we encounter claims.

Some would argue that the Republican party supports this idea as part of their party platform – that only the wealthy should control what happens to the rest of the population. Or that the moral and religious views of a minority of interpreters should govern what people can or cannot do with their lives and bodies.

We could also say that the military is a body like this, and without much controversy at all compared to the previous paragraph. This is how it should be – the officers should say what the soldiers should do, and they should do it.

This is also very much like where I work, a university, where the vast majority of people there have no say about what courses they need or have to take, and a small minority of folks at the university tell them what they need.

But McCarthy is deploying this very strange argument in the context of democracy and voting. Although the House of Representatives is not really a democracy, per se – there are all kinds of previous restrictions on what can be argued there, brought up, and who can participate – the sense that the House is a place for open debate and argument and that the majority of votes should win after an issue is handled – resonates well with his audience that he’s trying to reach.

It just makes sense that 90% should overrule the 10% doesn’t it?

But where does that sense-making come from? I believe it comes from the context. There are many contexts where one wouldn’t want to deploy this argument at all.

When we see this sort of argument deployed, it’s multilayered to be sure. Who is in control? Who should be in control? What’s the support and evidence behind this claim? All these questions are very important ones to start with to engage what McCarthy said.

However what is often left out of such analysis is that the context of where and when he said it – what Kenneth Burke referred to in his theory of human motives as “scene” – overdetermines how these other questions can be asked. It also leaves out a very important line of questioning: Does McCarthy understand the scene he’s referring to?

Is the House of Representatives an open democracy? Is majority rule the way of the United States? Is that the way of a healthy deliberative body? What about the context, situation, and reasons why holdouts are holding out? These questions are important starters not only for engaging what he said, but the ideology behind it. His very conceptions as to how democracy should work are on the table after one starts to chase these questions.

Although no closer to determining if he will become Speaker, these sophistic modes of engagement with a statement open up a much more important line of reasoning: What are the appropriate conceptions of democracy, and does this candidate adhere to them? If not, is it close enough to the ideal for us to compromise our beliefs and values to support him?

Without detailed contextual lines of questioning, democratic governance becomes impossible, or at least difficult. Without context, one exists only in strict ideology where there is truth and fiction. And no compromise is possible. Without that, there is no chance for shared governance.

A few surprises already have hit me in 2023. One is that the government may not be that incompetent. I sent in my Passport renewal (it expires in March) on December 10th, roughly. I am pretty sure I remember the date because I had a couple of other things to drop in the mail that day and figured since I was done I would put my application in and get the Passport back in February.

I wasn’t in my apartment from December 22nd all the way to the 28th, where I returned and checked my mail to find my new passport in there. That’s roughly 18 days total turnaround, which blows my mind. This is normal processing not expedited.

I sent the whole thing to Texas and got the new Passport from Boston and then the old one came from VA, so who knows? I guess at some point everything was at the State Department.

The second thing is that I got a great new gaming chair so I hope to spend more time on my desktop computer than laptop. It’s much more conducive to writing and recording than my other methods of writing have been.

Mostly that’s the office, where there are a lot of distractions and things to do that are not sitting around writing a post, and a lot of great conversations to be had. The office could be a better place to write with a few schedule adjustments. More on that in another post.

My dead couch (it bottomed out a few months ago) sits on the curb tonight waiting to be collected by the Sanitation department tomorrow morning. I am very glad to be getting a new one and starting 2023 sitting on something better than fabric and broken wood a few inches above the hardwood floor. It is surprising how important a couch really is.

Writing for me is more than important. It’s a way I have for discovering what I think about various things. As a practicing Sophist and a teacher of rhetoric, I find it essential to always be able to think about alternative points of view on any issue (please note that I did not say the other side, this is not Stranger Things or some derivative).

I’m hoping that the new couch, new chair, and new passport which arrived in the opposite order that I’ve listed here (couch still has not arrived, but is on schedule) will establish a bit of a better environment for writing things fit for reading.