I wouldn’t exactly say I am missing debate ha ha ha
At lunch yesterday – “Do you miss debate?”
“I do every day.” I had to be honest in that moment for some reason. My typical answer, from the PR office, is “not one bit.” But perhaps the senior staff wasn’t in and an intern answered that call.
I had to be honest. Is this my honest response? I think so.
But what is it I miss?
The mismanaged tournaments? Arranging the travel? Worried about what could happen to students on trips (the horrors of imagination always had a death-grip on me, from twisted ankle to much, much worse)? Colleagues who had all the intellectual depth and rigor of a little league coach? Topics that were worse than irrelevant? Principles and practices that ran counter to what research tells us about reason, persuasion and rhetoric?
Why was that the answer? I still have no idea. Writing this the day after though is helping me work it out, and here’s what I have.
Teaching debate is teaching poesis, or making, with something that is so human – language – although perhaps not uniquely human. It’s good to keep that debate alive perhaps. But the human misuse of symbols to communicate (Burke) is a very rewarding thing to practice. And practicing it is all we do in debate programs. All we should do anyway.
There are a vast majority of debate programs where “border patrol” is the order of the day: These arguments will always win, these won’t; This is the correct way to talk about this issue, this one is the discourse of evil people. Arguments are evaluated on the heart, not on the audience. There are no audiences in intercollegiate debate, there’s only liturgy that must be recited properly.
I was hoping that we’d eliminate these debate programs but they seem alive and well, the tournament continues to live even though the head was removed and buried in 2020. Hydras never die, they can lose a lot of heads and be fine.
I don’t miss any of this. My life is better without this as a part of my life. But the weekly meetings and the idea of working on creating something is what I miss.
More particularly, I miss the idea that debate starts with a student utterance. It doesn’t start with the teacher or professor’s utterance. It’s about the students offering a “lecture” and the teacher “responding.”
If done right it’s student driven. The students respond. If done at the highest level, there is no student, there is no professor. The classroom and university dissolve: The best level.
Never got there myself but that promise, or that possibility or hope – whatever you’d like to call it – that the words generated by students but not as students had latent power in them enough to dissolve the nearly immutable power relations of the campus to the point where we really could start with the basics, or “from scratch,” maybe the oldest form of communication. It’s also not lost on me that Scratch is the name of the devil in one of my favorite pieces of writing The Devil and Daniel Webster.
This is what I miss: The possibility of the dissolution of all restrictive organizations of the university through doing what the (contemporary) university cannot imagine and forbids the possibility of: Student creation of meaning on their own terms. If I could recover this without the tournaments, the idiots, the foul practices, and the egos, I’d be there. The least likely place for this to bubble up again besides the cafeteria? Maybe public speaking class.
President Joe Biden could not have given a speech more diametrically opposed in rhetorical power and quality to President Zelenskyy this week. Biden’s State of the Union will be historically remembered as a mix of tepid and strange, like re-using a tea bag in hot water drawn from the tap.
The State of the Union speech is not required by the United States constitution. Here’s the section that is relevant:
Article 2, Section 3:
He [The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information on 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 was done in writing for most of the history of the United States. It was Woodrow Wilson who first started to use it politically, as something to get attention back on the President and Presidency for political gain. Since then, it’s become a tradition, one that I think we might consider doing away with.
Biden’s speech was harmful to the importance of rhetoric. Specifically, it reinforced a definition of rhetoric as inert, inactive, exclusive, expository, and descriptive (opposed in this case to constitutive) of the world.
After the refreshing power of public address demonstrated recently by Zelenskyy, who should be on everyone’s mind – The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Kenyan Ambassador, and others come to mind – Biden’s speech seems tone-deaf to where we are in terms of public address. When speech becomes obligation we are doomed as a democracy. This is what Biden’s speech represented: An indicator to go look at other indicators. Directions on where to go. No attempt to invite any kind of conversation, interpretation, or thought. The State of the Union should be more than that, although yes I do realize that most of the time they are not very good.
It’s time to eliminate the State of the Union, or demand something better from our President.
Here are some issues and concerns I had with the speech:
No cadence or fluidity: There didn’t seem to be any indication that President Biden was interested in holding for applause, letting his words sink in, or letting the attending audience participate in the creation of the meaning of his speech. It’s a nice powerful bit of visual seriousness and support when the President waits for members of Congress to express through cheering their support of an idea – or at least indicate their will toward an issue that was brought up.
The Absence of the Rhetorical Use of Silence and Acclimation: When applause tried to occur, Biden just powered through the applause. He didn’t wait. It was very awkward, and really detracted from any sort of powerful moment he wanted to convey. He didn’t seem to care, or be aware, that these moments work very well when played back on clips in the national media. There’s no circulation here. Like a first-year university student in a public speaking course, he couldn’t wait to get to the end.
Expository not Argumentative: The speech never built up anything. It was like a school report. Here’s this number, that one. No indication of how we are supposed to think about it, but more vitally: No indication as to how we should feel. Even moments where he was trying to get us to move thoughtfully or emotionally came off flat, such as “We’re all going to be OK.” The way this was delivered and offered conveyed a feeling of worry to me, as I’m sure it did to many people.
A Flat Consistent Tone: There were a few moments where Biden’s tone of voice should have shifted to offer proof through conveying feeling, which Aristotle called pathos. The speech was like a bad pop song, mixed to the maximum levels of the recording with no quiet spots and no loud ones. A pivotal moment might have been to switch from a defiant, powerful tone when discussing Putin and Ukraine to something more somber when discussing the losses Americans faced across the board during the pandemic. There were many moments to shift tone to indicate the feeling, or the part of the narrative that America was in, and how we were overcoming those moments. All lost on Biden, who was giving a school report.
No place for us: We were told who we are, what we think, what we feel, and what we believe. There were zero constitutive moments here for us to think, feel, or imagine who we are or who we could be. We were told things were bad, and getting better. We were told that investment is increasing. We were not invited to invest. We were simply told how things are.
Rhetoric’s primary power is that of imagination and the creation of possibility in the minds of the audience. We can take this in a number of directions, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s limit it to the idea of feeling immersed in something. Biden could have, through tone, delivery, and making a space for us to think and consider things – provide our own views along side his – immersed us in an America that faces and faced unprecedented threats but is seeing it through. We could have been right there, seeing the dawn, participating through our thoughts in feelings in the change. But instead of this dip in the ocean of potential, Biden showed us the rhetorical equivalent of a home video of a tropical fish tank. Here it is; accept it as it is. If you want to see more, go there and look at it yourself.
This kind of poverty of rhetoric impacts democracy by taking the primary instrument of democracy – the oration, the sharing of ideas through speech – and rendering it into an obligatory ceremony of listing supposed facts. The most vital part of democracy is the ability to share perspective, but not as fact – as invitation to imagine something otherwise. Any nationally televised speech by a chief executive to the assembled members of congress should not just be political ritual, but a model or an ideal of sorts as to how to use our words to reach others. Stop listing accomplishments; start crafting possibility. Give the people something to hold and make their own, something to build their own ideas off of in their communities and families. Biden didn’t just give a bad or confusing speech; he actively harmed the role of oratory in a supposedly democratic system.
Public Address, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy in Existential Times
In posting this essay, I realize it is not going to be up to the task I have in mind for it, but I’m posting it anyway for reasons that appear about halfway through the writing of it. As Peter Elbow instructs, “the words will show you where to go.” True for this piece and also true for the way that I have been thinking about, worrying about, and attending to the horrific invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
In 2009 I taught at a debate workshop in Slovenia. At that workshop were students from all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe. I met some Ukrainian students there, and we hit it off. They were great.
In 2010 they invited me to come teach at their university for a couple of weeks. The university funded the whole thing, and it was really fantastic. This is one of the trips of a great many I’ve taken to teach debate and rhetoric that I think about more often than any other.
During that class there were so many things going on that I was really uncertain whether I was teaching anything or not. I felt there were few handholds and fewer signs that students were “getting it.” Since that time I’ve come to realize this feeling is the feeling of “going beyond” – a phrase I borrow from Buddhism – where the binaries are not erased, ignored, or banned, but transcended through a discourse where the binary just no longer makes any sense. In short, I learned a lot and felt like the students did too. So where was the teacher? It was a great moment and one I reflect on pretty often. I try to reconstitute this, but it’s been tough, mostly because of my attitude.
Since that time, I have let my doubt grow like an algae on the side of the fishtank about words, debate, argument, and their ilk. The layers I wonder about now, on this blog and elsewhere, about the efficacy of teaching debate in a world where Plato’s Thrasymachus and Callicles are not just right but perhaps the only game in town. What’s the point? You can teach people to offer incredible words, explain things extremely well, and engage others with intensity and care in a way that hopefully will move them. But can good words elevate to the level of a predator drone? A MiG? A missile? These material objects are coated in recalcitrance to our expressed desires. It seems that the material world around us is firm and real, and we just speak in the cracks. We don’t constitute much, if any of it.
This attitude is sadly common among the teachers of speech that I encounter, that speech and argument, debate, and their relations are really only good enough to be considered a business skill – something you can use occasionally to perhaps enrich yourself a little more than your neighbor. So much for the grand narrative of democracy, of the great experiment in liberty and freedom that often is the way American democracy is described. Perhaps that’s just marketing. But I like to think that somewhere, at some level, there’s an incredible and overlooked ability in words. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has been aptly demonstrating this, and it’s worth a bit of a closer look not just at him but at his rhetorical attitude and aptitude. I believe it to be a rare moment that should be more commonplace.
It feels weird to try to talk about political speech as something very meaningful. In American public address, it has a taste of real cynicism. I was trying to think of American speeches to compare to Zelenskyy’s, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Of course, it’s naive to think there was a time when United States public address was free of corporate slime. It’s always there, always growing on the porous surface of speech no matter how hard you scrub. But that sort of cynicism might encourage us to think that the power of speaking up and out has no muscle. That it is not symbolic but purely symbolic – or only symbolic. Or that human speech in the form of public address is a reflex, something that has to happen. It is time to address the country. What else can we do? I think the twin forces of cynicism of speech as a thin veneer, combined with a haughty, misplaced confidence in the “right” of free speech have worked well together to convince most Americans that speech isn’t that powerful or great, but it’s important that we think it is.
But in an existential situation, a situation where total loss is the outcome, all things even public address rise to the occasion. This is where Ukraine is now. This isn’t a familiar conflict. This isn’t some sort of insurrection or police action. This is an attempt to end a people, to end a country. This level of threat is being countered by Ukrainians in an incredible show of passion, force, zeal, and strength.
The problem arises when we associate rhetoric, public address, argument, or words with the true and the factual as some sort of wedge meant to wrench people out of a position and into a new one. Rhetoric is not mechanical nor is it a skill. It is a creative art, an art of getting people to see themselves as others. They can see themselves in the words of the speaker, or the speaker in them, or the words of the speaker as already part of them – a relation between them, the speaker, and the speaker’s words. Rhetoric’s art is the art of creation, of making, of constituting words out of the air, a message out of parts, and an audience out of people. The rhetor does it all at once. At the best, you don’t understand or even agree with the words, you are carried along by them, you feel your place among them immediately. In teaching debate, I often offer this aporia to the students: You can recognize an argument as excellent, true, and perfect yet could not predict that argument before you heard it. How does that work?
President Zelenskyy demonstrated this art beautifully, and continues to do so. His speech on the eve of invasion was a masterclass in public address’s ability to reconstitute the field – any field – thought, or action. I was thinking of a retired Pentagon General on CNN explaining that the Russian military’s launching of missiles across the border was “preparation of the battlefield.” Zelenskyy was doing the same thing rhetorically. If a missile sends a message or wipes a slate clean, it has a much shorter range of arguments that are doing the same thing.
Here we see President Zelenskyy do everything you want in a speech. He constitutes the audience in a double: The Russian people, and us, the eavesdroppers on a personal plea. We are hearing something we “are not meant to hear.” But we are meant to hear it. We are able to judge Zelenskyy’s character by how he speaks to the people who are poised to invade his country and wipe out his government.
He turns the entire field of his speech not into his reasons, but consideration of their reasons. What’s really behind these ideas, these statements that you are hearing? What do these things mean? Zelenskyy positions himself as a critic alongside the Russian people, not opposed to what he assumes they believe. Instead, he assumes they think like he does; that they too are not sure what is behind what the Russian government is saying.
He does not address the Russian government – he asks if Russia itself really wants this. He “rebifurcates” the obvious binary we came to the speech holding. He is not interested in what the Russian government wants. His entire speech is a counterpoint to his opening: If the Russian government will respond to his attempt at communication with silence, he will render them into silence in his address. They don’t just stay silent; they do not take place. This is between two peoples, and people who he is about to constitute as “people.”
He locates his position in the stuff of everyday life. Football matches. Families. Friends and walks. Love. This is placed in parallel to the supposed “stark” use of a fact: A large, shared border. We leave that border to learn that’s not all that is shared. The border seems massive at the start of the speech. By the end, the shared border is just one of many shared things, and not even close to the most vital. This contrast is really something. The scope and size of the shared border should be one of the biggest facts at play in the argument. Yelenskyy reduces it to a stage, something incidental.
He can only suspect what Russians want: Even though he speaks in Russian, some of the personal examples, he admits, might not be that meaningful to his audience. But there are deeply shared things that go beyond language and culture here. Values that nobody would deny, which are also Ukrainian values: To live their lives, decide their own fate. This is beyond a “shared value,” this is escalated in Zelenskyy’s delivery. He speaks of the sovereign right of all human beings. Both Ukrainians and Russians can understand this. And by omission, the Russian Government does not. He never says the Russian government is wrong. We simply have to accept it, from our constituted shared position as human beings. They don’t get to disagree; they just aren’t in a conversation about this.
His delivery is personal. He lets us know he is speaking as a citizen. He asks questions. He hesitates. The delivery is confident, personal, assured, and caring. It will be understood by rhetorical scholars as one of the very best uses of pathos in the history of public address. But it’s not just pathos. Zelenskyy can only speak as the President of Ukraine. He can’t avoid that identity. But he can, like a gestalt, bring forward other images out of his role as President. In such a position, one has the faith and confidence of the people – perhaps a more legitimate source of power than an oath, or a constitution could ever provide. He can speak as the people, as one of the people – a synecdoche of Ukraine. President or citizen, these parts understand the value of the whole, the importance of what can be lost. This is ethos, and in its traditional formulation as something much more complex and powerful than “expertise,” which is how most American public speaking texts and teachers treat it. Here’s someone who can be President and citizen at once. Perhaps he can be a citizen because he’s President; perhaps he’s President because he can speak this way. It’s nicely blurred; it has to be blurred.
I’ll be updating this later with some other posts as I get more English translations of Zelenskyy’s speeches. Someone who is well-trained in rhetoric can present themselves however they wish; the rhetorical master does the same but without the notion of presenting. They just are that. The words are not an appeal, they are the right words. It’s vital to realize that rhetoric is still present, it is operating, but it is at such a fine level that it cannot be distinguished from actuality. “This is a good speech” is a world away from “that’s right,” particularly when the exigence doesn’t get any more severe than this.
It is shameful to think that this sort of threat does not loom larger in peacetime as the reason to encourage more faith in words, in argument, in debate. I feel ashamed at my doubt. I feel somewhat silly and powerless too writing about something like a speech in this moment. But doubt itself can be a resource for understanding, faith, and the creation of meaningful human relations. The way people think is in words, it is influenced deeply by words. Once heard or read, they are a part of that process. This is something that the machinery of war can never have. Is this propaganda? Is this reality? The best sort of rhetoric defies and defines both; it’s the dissolution of binaries – it’s just good.
Instead of thinking of words as part and parcel of the democratic educational experience, the existence of the existential threat – the looming of the total loss – should be more apparent when we think about public address. There’s nothing that can stop it’s force from equating that of the materiel in war, by whatever means. Teaching in Ukraine raised a lot of these questions for me that I thought I had settled. Standing with Ukraine today facing a terrifying darkness has them up and about again, but with a better understanding of the importance, and power, of speaking to others – providing the means necessary for others to change, to transform, to move differently through the world, to reconstitute a world to move through; the heart of education; the heart of rhetoric. We are with you because we are you, you are us, we share words and through that we have it all.
Where did my daily writing habit go? It would be easy to say it went away when teaching began, but that trope is worn out. Everyone says this. It’s not really true. There are choices we make. Still, it makes me feel a little down on myself.
I’ve been teaching a lot, and wondering about the state of the university. I’m not alone. Everyone is wondering about the state of the university. On one of the first days back on campus I captured this image of the university at the university.
Halfway through the term I am confronted again with the feeling that all my efforts are not really doing much to counter this model of higher education, where the perfect form of exchange is missing the entire reason why the machine exists in the first place.
I could take a lesson here from Ralph Ellison. I should realize that the vending machine metaphor is an effect of industrial, capital America and abandon that when thinking about the role of rhetoric.
One cannot rely on a comfortable metaphor of transaction when writing or composing or preparing rhetoric for an audience. The comfort kills the effort. Instead we must think about the exchange over the result. Or the process, if we can think about it outside of a “who gets what” set of terms.
Imagination is not something that is encouraged in the official channels of higher education. There’s little to no imagination; there are demands at every level. Assess. Declare a major. Take the courses in sequence. Check your credits. Apply for a degree. Show up on time. Put your phone away. Read the powerpoint off the screen. This is education; this is learning.
The only space for imagination happens haphazardly, accidentally, and in the spaces where faculty and students find the “artificial gravity” of the university lacking or perhaps malfunctioning.
The malfunction is a mechanical problem, a problem in a life organized by machines and people, but more the machinery set in motion by people. We might think of it as mistakes, were it not so loaded with negativity, as it has been since industrialization (and well into the world of the algorithm).
The university: put in your money and watch the plastic corkscrew spin. There’s nothing in there – not even any chips to get stuck. There’s no place to locate frustration even. You know what you are getting when you pay. The university is out of everything, including the Cheeze Its.
What do we have? A bunch of people in a semi-residential space who interact regularly as they exercise some agency going to class, or not, the library, the dining call, the student center. This seems like a resource to me. It seems less accidental than the classroom sometimes. It seems like the place where I remember student interaction the most, where I’m totally not prepared (or am I?) for teaching, but where a lot of teaching can happen.
Trying to use the classroom as this kind of space fails right away because the students are so well trained by their bad teachers and professors that this is a place of supplication, of reception, no opinions are really taken seriously here, and if there is critical thinking to do it consists of trying to figure out what the professor “really wants” you to do to get an A – and how to short circuit that machine to deliver it for very little effort. Like a vending machine, there are ways to get it to drop two bags of chips for the price of one, or less, if it were stocked of course.
Back to the idea of feeling blue, or funky – last fall I was teaching so much and to be honest, I was much happier than I am this semester. But is that really true? I think last fall I didn’t have time to feel much. I was always “in it.” I was grading, listening, teaching, or prepping. There was no time to reflect on what I was doing because I was doing it.
This is a good lesson to faculty who, in a panic over their own teacher identity, assign a ton of small things to students to do in order to grade them. Discussion board posts, quizzes, reading reactions – the list goes on. There’s no time for students to judge and reflect if they are always “in it.” This sparks a particular attitude and discourse from students about college that is comfortable, but perhaps not very educational or productive. They might love being on top of the work, or they might think college is a sham. But whatever discourse they adopt, they are not really reflecting on anything except the machinery of college. Where is the time and the place for them to reflect on the subject matter, the course as such?
I didn’t have much time to do it, and now I do, and I’m filled with wonder and uncertainty. This feels like a first step. What am I to do with my uncertainty? Perhaps this question is too scary for the university classroom or for faculty.
My thousand-word habit is best conceived of as a mistake, a malfunction, a place where gravity and other basic laws are challenged or simply don’t work, it is a necessary energy-producing activity that allows imagination to pierce through into the route classroom, the place where discipline and obedience are the only things thought about to get the grade. Although there’s no direct line, me sitting here at my keyboard, imagining you, imagining a lot of you, does a lot for me and my ability to think and consider others than it does for you. Perhaps you can think of a response to these writings and it does that for you as you imagine me, lots of people similar to me, and you think about what words would reach us (me). perhaps we need to structure our daily teaching and learning lives around the provision of texts that demand more than a mechanistic response; reconsider discipline as the act of thinking about others rather than doing what we imagine power wants us to do (professors being the worst offenders of this, and passing that bad habit off as ‘“being educated”).
The famous story of the Roman emperor who marched a legion of soldiers into the sea in order to stop the waves comes to mind when looking at this poster. The desire to keep students focused and attentive is a good one; the method is ridiculous. The quote at the bottom of this poster really sums up most educational rhetoric – like a scented candle it’s pretty and smells great, but is neither illuminating nor substantive. It smells good but that’s about it.
Instead of using the force and authoritarianism of the school to command attention, incorporating extant technologies into the school day is the better way to go. These devices are not adjacent to daily life; they are daily life. And the incredible power they have – rhetorical and communicative power – is lost on the classroom teacher who is loyal for some unknown reason to methods of teaching that have changed very little since the 19th century – a board behind, a teacher in front, students all facing the same direction.
Imagine what would happen if students were able to find on their phone a video by an expert in what they were studying and share it with the class. Imagine if the teacher could help them identify bad information on the phone when it’s presented. These are things I do regularly in the university, and it’s shocking to me the information illiteracy that the students have. But then I think of signs like this.
If teaching is about control and obedience, information must be limited. Access to information must be limited. In early industrial factories, no other clocks were permitted on the premises – only the official clock of the factory was allowed. In the contemporary school, only the teacher can be a source of information, no other information sources are allowed.
Most students across the United States primarily use the internet through a phone. The banning of a phone in a classroom is the equivalent of banning notebooks and pens and forcing students to use a slate to interact in class. The mobile phone is a powerful ally in teaching to someone who sees teaching as a cooperative, generative activity – and that’s the heart of the issue. Most professors and most teachers for that matter see teaching not as cooperative and generative, but as adversarial and conservative, i.e. The student must be the passive recipient of the knowledge that I am authorized to and must share with them to determine if they “get it.”
There are a lot of critiques of this model available. I’ll just bring up the one I care about the most, which is the idea that this type of education assumes a world of isolated people. There’s little to no democracy (as modeled through interaction and persuasion), there’s no community, no collaboration, nothing like this. There’s you and your “knowledge,” alone, fighting your way forward through the world. Intelligence and competence are seen as individual successes and failures, not things that are worthy of community intervention or praise. This model of teaching – where one person performs the authorized way to be a subject of knowledge – is not what we need in a world where information is abundant and accessible.
Practicing with this availability is what’s needed, an admittedly harder form of discipline than just banning the phone from the classroom. It’s necessary though – if education, the way we want to practice it, is going to survive, we need to stop placing it in opposition to regular, daily life where the phone is an equal participant in all debates and discussions, providing information and perspective, enriching the intellectual lives of people. To call it irrelevant, troublesome, or alien to the educational environment does nothing but make school irrelevant, a bad cosplay convention of early 20th century information economies.
