After reading this, I know now why my days are much more entertaining when I get that 3PM cup.
Well the past few days have been awesome. I’ve been putting together a very difficult syllabus on Feminist rhetoric for a small independent study with three students. Fun and challenging at the same time and also with a large sense of dread about leaving something out. However, I think that a syllabus is like a map of a larger argument. Courses are like arguments, with the claim “This is what you need to know” twisted and altered to fit the conditions of the instructor and students and the time. So there’s no perfect coverage, just the instructor’s perspective as an expert in the field.
Everyone is way too excited about the inauguration. I didn’t think it was very interesting until I started looking at the cultural response to it instead of the political/news-cycle response. Here’s a great music video about the inauguration:
Now if you watched that three things should come to mind. First, you should want one of those hoodies. Secondly, where can one purchase a blue Lamborghini? Finally, you might notice the visual quotes in that video from this one:
The differences are stark – people protesting versus people protesting. But both look like parties. And the names and geographical locations that are celebrated on signs are a bit different – not just because of the time, but perhaps other reasons? And both have a contradiction with the push to work within the political system forwarded, as well as some direct and subtle claims that one should be a subversive.
I wonder what other cultural products will be produced by this inauguration and administration?
One of the more baffling moments for me at my first Worlds was the reasons many chairs gave for their decisions. It’s not to say that I disagreed with every decision or anything like that – I was actually in agreement with most every panel, and right now can’t really think of any exceptions to that. I thought they were all very good judges, and the panelists could have easily been chairs as well. What I am more interested in is the rhetoric used to explain or justify a decision and the word at the center of that whirling discourse – persuasiveness.
Many times a team was praised for really having “the most persuasive argument” or “that argument had persuasiveness.” Many times a team was docked because they “were not persuasive” or their arguments “lacked persuasiveness.”
As a teacher and student of rhetoric I would think I would have no problem with this, but the more I heard it discussed, and the more I asked “what do you mean by that?” The more confused and uncertain I became as to what “persuasiveness” meant in these adjudications. I figured that it must refer to some aesthetic feeling that a team was better than another one, and the term persuasiveness was used to convey that feeling of argumentative superiority that was un-conveyable in a close read of the argumentation.
So I think there are two possible definitions of “persuasiveness” as it was used by judges during decisions:
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Persuasiveness is a metaphysical thing a capital-P persuasive, where the arguments, speech, demeanor, and attitude of the speaker meet the criterion of someone who is “persuasive” on a universal level, and this speech on this topic would be considered to be good by anyone, or effective to anyone because it contains these universal, timeless elements of persuasiveness.
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Persuasiveness is a litmus test: I can imagine an audience interested in this issue, and if this general, intelligent, public audience with no special training heard this speech they would be moved by it, they would find it effective, so therefore it’s a “persuasive” speech. The imagined audience would assent to the arguments from this speaker on this topic so therefore this speaker is being persuasive.
- Persuasiveness is a code word for something pleasurable, i.e. an aesthetic reaction to seeing an embodied being deliver a speech that resonates with the listener. This is the most visceral sort of reaction, overwhelming and engaging, practically transforming the physiology of the listener – the sort of crowd reactions to Gorgias that Plato and Socrates called “psychagogic” or nearly hypnotic agreement due to cadence, tone and style. Of course, that’s a bit over the top, but there were moments where the “feeling” that the team or speaker engendered was noted as achieving “persuasiveness.”
Of course there might be other nuanced definitions, and there might be some spillover between these definitions and how they were used, but I’m just reporting inductively from my experience. What is most interesting to me to note is how far removed all three definitions are from the general definition of “persuasiveness” that would be forwarded by an American policy debater or judge. That sort of “persuasiveness” is a very technical accomplishment, a closing of the holes or a tightening of the hatches. This sort of “persuasiveness” is much more holistic and much more general audience focused.
In the end, I think that a combination of definitions 1 and 3 was being forwarded more often than not, and definition 2 I really like because it is the Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca definition of audience centered argumentation. It is less active than it appears as they would say any writer or arguer can’t help but imagine a Universal Audience to which all their argumentation is addressed. I’m doing it now in a sense writing this post for imagined you. The effectiveness is probably measured by the gap between my words and their effectiveness on changing your thought or gaining your assent to my claims here.
In the end, there also might be more technical judging going on than I realize. I’m from a format where the technical is hyperbolized into the entire argumentative event. So immersion in any format, style or method where that isn’t the case would appear at first to be atechnical. Perhaps after another few years I’ll reassess the role of technical argumentation in WUDC style. For now, I think it to be focused on the holistic experience, and the technicalities, save when they contribute to that holism, are disposable.
Now I’m left with the question of how to teach the Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca mode of argumentation and how to push that mode of thinking toward those who judge. I feel that this is a very beneficial model for the pedagogical side of debating. I wonder if there are other judges out there who use this model as a way of approaching adjudication?
The judges assemble as the pairing scrolls by.
So today I just uploaded to facebook all my pictures from Cork. And I caught up on some email and other things. A pretty throw away day, except I picked up lunch for my wife and dropped it off on campus for her, which gave me a chance to go by the library and get a book I need for syllabus crafting, which should start tonight/tomorrow.
My AC adapter for my rechargeable battery station is fried so that sucks. Time for a trip to radio shack.
So here’s my first reflection on Worlds now that I’ve had a day or so to think about it – Consensus judging is really no consensus at all. It’s judge training/indoctrination worked in as a part of the system.
The attitude I got from many judges here and there through the tournament was that chairs are the decision makers, and they are there to gently show the wing judges how the round should be judged. They are the ones empowered to demonstrate to the wing judges how a round should properly be judged.
Now of course, wings can outvote a chair if there are enough of them to overrule the chair’s decision. The slang for this is “rolling” the chair. And discussions I had with people who rolled or were rolled indicated that it is at the least an insult to the chair, and most likely seen as some sort of punishable move. In the end, the wings are supposed to agree with the chair.
I find this pretty fascinating because on the one hand I absolutely love the idea of a built-in judge training system that uses real tournament experience to improve the abilities of the judge. On the other hand, it’s easy for it to fall into politics or into bad indoctrination – as one chair said to me after a debate when I was asking about this sort of stuff, “I’m a chair: I know how these things should be judged, wings don’t.” The danger here is a move to an expertise based judge system – like policy debate – where the judges are blamed for the failure of a team to win because they can’t take a good flow or don’t understand the arguments.
I like BP/WUDC style because the onus is more on the teams as of now to adapt and be “persuasive” – a key word for judges that I spoke to in Cork. The consensus judging system can certainly help keep it this way, as long as some element of diversity is left in the judging system and not squeezed out by persuasive Chairs who could possibly end up pushing a univocal, technical view of debate judging worldwide. The cultural/regional differences in how debate is viewed are incredibly important for the pedagogy of debate, throughout the entire history of rhetoric.
I like the educational potential of consensus judging, but not the indoctrination/persuader model of the Chair. Instead, I like the model of the Chair as “Socrates” – questioning each and every decision from the wings to make sure they have fairly accounted for each and every argument in the debate, and really have given each team their due in the course of the debate. When I serve as Chair here and there, I notice that a lot of the top half of the debate is oversimplified often times (even by me because, hey, that was a long time ago once you are finishing up the Opp Whip speech). I usually use the discussion period to make sure that we are fairly representing the arguments of the first tables. Under a Socratic paradigm, the chair makes sure that the wings are listening carefully, and learning how to evaluate arguments in the round with as little personal bias as possible.
So I wonder – what is the role of the chair in a consensus system? Is it to convince the other judges that he or she is right? Is it to hear the views of the wings and construct a decision that satisfies all adjudicators? Or is it to serve as a Socratic gadfly to the wing judges, questioning and probing their assumptions about the debate, making sure that the decision is defensible from all skeptical sides?
Yes I realize I am terrible at keeping up things here while I’m off and about doing debate stuff. It’s such a great time and there are always a million great people to talk to and to meet and to re-connect with.
Worlds was like this only magnified on a global scale, so I didn’t do much posting although I thought about a lot of things that I would like to say about it on several different levels. I probably should have written some of it down or something.
Well for the past few days I’ve lost my energy (it’s about a 10 day tournament give or take) and thought mostly about going home.
And now that I’m back home from my first Worlds tournament I’m having a bit of separation anxiety and really wish I was back there in a weird way.
So I think as I think about things I’ll update and put some of my favorite pictures up here as well so you don’t just have to read the boring text.