The New York Sophist

A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event.

Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech.

From my point of view, there’s nothing really exemplary or exciting about either of these speeches. They were showcases of the traditional tropes and forms you’d expect to hear from the new President and VP elect. It was a “greatest hits” of these tropes and figures, reminding me of so many previous addresses by so many other candidates.

This doesn’t mean the speeches were “bad” – they were just expected. And I’m really feeling the lag from four years of the irony that Trump provided: Every Presidential-level address you’d expect to be totally crazy, unhinged, and well – all over the place.

Novelty is a dangerous thing in speech as it can train the audience to always be looking for that novel move or content instead of what you might want them to do, and also it creates a short memory for your addresses. For Trump this works out great as he has very little in terms of policy development to offer. For Biden, novelty would be a huge threat to his policy initiatives. Harris too.

Returning to the comfort of bland political speech probably felt comfortable to most who watched and heard the speeches. It felt like there were again guideposts or guardrails in national politics. These speeches could be classified as a “return to normalcy” which might be something critics would say is totally called for. It’s also on brand for speeches that are supposedly victory speeches (although these did not feel like victory speeches for a lot of reasons in the context).

Here are the things that the speeches did that I thought were valuable:

1. Provided a sense of comfort in the articulation of a return to “normalcy” in the way they were structured, delivered, and the combination of delicious flavors we haven’t had in a while (imagine returning to grandma’s after a long absence).
2. Marked the exigency of the ballot counting being over and that the result was official and legitimate (necessary given the floating arguments about corruption without anchor point).
3. Marked the historic moment of a non-white woman about to occupy the office of Vice President. What does this mean? What will it mean? This is in order in terms of “victory” speeches (perhaps the most victory moment there) in terms of epideictic rhetoric, the only irony in the speech is that this radical historical moment was handled with very traditional, Aristotelian gloves even in terms of public address! Again not a flaw, but something to notice.

Here are the concerns I have about the speeches:

1. Reliance on the trope that we need to come together as a nation is dangerous; it was aimed at a very different America. This argument needs to alter to consider: Social media, obsession with facts as the only/ultimate arbiter of political discourse, 24 hour for-profit cable news that is partisan, and the coronavirus. Why was this not a theme of examination for both speeches? Dangerous as it address nobody except the blind Biden faithful (who will read it as “yes we won, you have to accept it” – coming together for them is nothing short of agreement). When old tropes come back around they need to be introduced or at least not show up in their 90s haircut like last night.
2. No suggestions on how to rhetorically navigate the upcoming litigation. Perhaps ignorance is not just bliss, but a good strategy – if these cases are illegitimate, should it appear in a speech? This is a great question. In my mind, ignoring the upcoming challenges might not have been smart. What would have been great here would have been a reference to “situations” where “devisive” forces might try to discredit the “accomplishment” that we “all share tonight.” Something like that would have been all that was needed, but ignoring the speculative utterances of the Trump campaign in totality just legitimizes the claim of theft from people who are sympathetic to the idea.
3. Related to this is that there’s a looming run-off election in Georgia that the upcoming Biden administration has a lot riding on. I wonder why there were not attempts to connect yesterday’s speeches about the future direction of the nation, the transformative spirit of the future, and the lofty goals and dreams of Americans in the same terms that the Georgia race for Senate was couched. They are obviously capable of this: Recall the many specific references to fracking in both the VP debate and Presidential debates. That’s too specific for my tastes for this need, but still, why not angle it a bit more? Contextualize this win in the terms of the changes we all feel that are happening to us (and also, because of us, but at the same time are inevitable no matter what we do – it’s a nice twist!).

I guess now that I’ve typed it all out, it seems to me that the speeches yesterday were a rhetorical success? I really don’t feel that way. I think the most important thing that will have to be overcome is the lack of Trumps dynamic style and clipped mode of public address, which people have come to associate with a President who is active and involved, and most importantly not a professional politician. It’s a significant challenge, and I’m pretty sure Biden and Harris will have several good ways of addressing this. But for the faithful and the haters, there’s little that could be done to change either opinion on them. That might be the biggest challenge yet: How to recover the value of changing up one’s mind.

Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would.

The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate?

I explore some of these ideas here. It must be something that I’m working on quite a bit in my unconscious mind as I was able to go for the whole time.

There’s no video – most likely due to privacy concerns for students and such, but I captured the audio.

I’m a big supporter of recording all of your courses, and making sure you record and share whatever happens in the classroom with students who are in that class. There’s really no reason to miss a lecture given the technology we have these days. Students who don’t turn up in person can just listen to the audio file later on.

Also it creates some nice metrics for yourself as a lecturer; you can go back and compare what you talked about last time to this time, etc.

Comments on the lecture are welcome!

For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or wondering what that book you are going to get from an Interlibrary loan will contain, or going to meet a colleague to talk about a writing idea. These are important spaces where intellectual work goes on that remain unappreciated and unexplored (at least to my knowledge).

My career was very aptly summed up accidentally in a recent conversation I had where the phrase “big lift for small impact” was used – that’s been everything I’ve done here at my university.

Obviously this applies to the work I did for the debate program here – no need to post about that again – but also for nearly anything else that I write or post or create. It’s a lot of time and effort. But there is one aspect of it where this might not make sense, and that’s teaching.

The common view of teaching at the university is “Professors teach as part of their job.” Using a traditional rhetorical means of invention, I inverted that to see what could be said: “Teachers profess as a part of their job.” This didn’t seem accurate.

Teaching is professing, it is in the heart of rhetoric, because not only are you saying “this is important, you must learn these things,” you are simultaneously creating that reality for the students: “This is important, here’s how you know it is important, because of these feelings and thoughts.”

This is lost on most professors who believe that their external markers of expertise are enough to generate this desire to know and desire to learn among students. At the high school level, bad teachers use authoritarian power moves to communicate importance as well as mind-numbing activities that produce discipline rather than interest. 

What is the rhetorical mode of professing? The verb means to declare or avow something. This seems like the mode of making a case, a persuasive address that proves that the subject is vital, important, or significant. Since it’s rhetorical that should be to the audience you are addressing, which nearly all professors miss. The attitude of the professor is “they are the ones who need to work hard to get it, they are the students.” This is often couched in terms of responsibility, which is always lacking among students. A quick survey of the history of rhetoric would indicate that this is a common trait of most assembled audiences too. 

When teaching, you are professing, you are making a case for your declaration or your passionate avowing of the importance of a concept, some information, or whatever you are teaching that class. And since all classes are different audiences, each one needs adaptation. 

Is there a case-based, rhetorical theory of teaching out there? The closest I’ve found is in Buddhism, particularly in Tibetan debates, but there’s a debate pedagogy tradition in the early U.S. as well. 

What about Rome? It is known that from time to time the rhetoric teachers would take on the unpopular opinion on a declamation case to show the students how it’s done, but did any take on the position of how to craft oratory in a particular way?

I guess what I’m looking for is models of how to speak when you are pushing the value of a central text to students, and you cannot do this without your take being involved. You can’t assume they are there because they are interested. So how do you convert them from people who have to attend, and hope it won’t be miserable, to people who feel lucky to be there, and who look forward to the next one?

I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes.

I’m not sure this is good pedagogy at all for the online classroom, but I’m pretty certain I’m providing some good content. The trick is if the students will ever watch enough of the videos to see it.

In my imagination, students are scrubbing the videos a lot. That is, they are moving the playhead back and forth, looking for parts of the video that they are most interested in or curious about. At least I hope that’s what they are doing!

Here’s a video for my public speaking students on style and delivery, about 20 minutes long – and meant to be much shorter.

Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort of thing. By the way, it’s not their fault they would think of a class that way; it’s all the bad teachers they’ve had who trained them that you should get credit for being present that are responsible.

Pragmadialectics -I think it’s important to know this theory, but I’m not even sure I fully understand it. Sometimes trying to explain something to yourself might be considered to be pretty good teaching. At least I hope so.

All comments, thoughts and questions welcome, as always!