The New York Sophist

We stan an endless series. Should I even still number these?

The stock issues of policy debate are one of the finest rubric/hermeneutic educational tools ever created. It really has incredible power for helping people invent reasons, one of the most difficult things to do rhetorically particularly if you don’t think critical thought, judgement, or thinking are forms of mediation.

The stock issues are made fun of these days and I doubt they are even taught to competitive debaters anymore. Instead, we get this weird idea that policy debate is about accusation – “your language indicates you have committed a crime” is the format of most debating arguments these days. The priority of finding “how they link” is the focus of most tournament-debate pedagogy, which is little more than trying to find an accusation that sticks to their speeches.

Tabling the debate over the value of a pedagogy of binary opposition (not sure what side I’d be on there to be honest), we can contrast a stock issues approach to thinking about composing a debate by thinking of it as a series of questions that are not answered, in fact, we cannot know the answer to those questions. We can only phrase the questions the best way we know how in order to figure out what we want to say about the topic. Ergo, we then figure out what the topic means, what it is about, and how to know the resolution/motion best. We do have an image for the stock issues approach:

The stock issues approach is a hermeneutic precisely because it generates mastery over knowledge. It generates an ordering principle from which the speaker can generate what is known about the opponent’s case, the topic, the evidence, etc. This is the rhetorical power of the stock issues. It opens up a number of unanswered questions about the resolution or the opposition and encourages students to seek answers. Any evidence they find will not be custom-made for the issue they face, so some alteration will have to happen. This is where mastery is derived; they have to figure out how to order the knowledge they have to where everything will pop into line, fall into place so others will see it. As you have probably already noticed, this is the mirror-image to the way WUDC/Worlds debating works, where one demonstrates familiarity with the world and the ‘obvious’ ways a principle masters the issue at hand, but there are no revolutionary calls for the re-ordering of that debated world.

The kritik – perhaps the most popular argument in policy debate (if you don’t consider it a malformed disadvantage) has this same structure as well. There are questions we can ask about the opposition’s discourse that we can never know the reasons for, but we can know the results of. We can show how what they say indicates that they have been mastered by others.

I think that the stock issues are an essential way to teach for my upcoming course because they provide students a way to master any controversy involving a policy choice, and generate important questions (doubts) about its relationship to other forms of information/evidence. The stock issue that still hangs around in the morass of contemporary policy debate is “sovlency” which is the most telling of the five – we can say that all issues dissolve into whether or not we get desirable results, desirable outcomes from the policy, the paradigm formerly known as “policy systems,” now “policy maker.” This stock issue can serve as metonymy for debate as a whole – “Solvent-cy” perhaps, as all discourse becomes understandable and teleological when articulated ‘substantively’ as the suspension of particles in a fluid.

Twitch might not be around much longer. Amazon announcing that they are cutting 35% of their workforce is grim news indeed. It is hard for me to believe it’s doing so poorly since I have always thought Twitch was an underdeveloped idea.

I was very lucky to talk to Twitch staff years ago by offering them a debate practice course that was streamed on their main Twitch channel. They brought me to San Francisco for this, and I toured the offices. Impressive down to every detail – a room called the “library” stocked with large wood tables and oversized leather couches and chairs where no talking was allowed; a stadium seating room with massive screen for regular multiplayer games (one staffer told me they have a regular lunch league game in his division); numerous library carts with huge CPUs that move easily through the office to wherever one wants to plug in and do some work; stocked snack rooms, drawers, refrigerators, endless cereal and ice cream; it goes on and on. At the point when I was beyond impressed, I was told by my tour guide that this was soon to be the “old office,” and a new one was being built a few blocks away.

I was invited out because I suggested to Twitch that focusing on streaming video games was a sideshow compared to the public sphere and rhetoric work the platform could be doing. I saw Twitch as an easy-to-access and engaging forum for rhetorical arts – primarily the art of debate – where the chat, the technology, and the ease of production could create a debate series where Twitch could offer the technological hub and center for all this. I suggested hosting some debates with a format of their own design that streamers could participate in, and based on views and interactivity they could assemble a Twitch debate “team” that could be challenged, or offer plenary programming on a Twitch official channel to spark the creation of more and varied responses and arguments about whatever issues Twitch felt needed to be discussed among their viewers/streamers/community.

My talk wasn’t very good, it wasn’t well received. Looking back on it, I realize now that one has to do a lot of work to pry apart the assumption that one debates to find the truth or one debates once one has discovered/uncovered the truth. Debate is the distribution channel of truth discovered via other means; a way to make people who haven’t done the research look stupid. This assumption is so deeply rooted in nearly everyone’s assumptions that calling attention to it isn’t enough; it has to be carefully dissected and dialectically analyzed before one can move forward in the celebration of debating.

Debating involves the creation and public sharing of reasons because reason is not designed for individual use – they are designed to be shared, always. People are extremely bad at thinking through things alone. We need to share reasons we think are good with others for pushback or we will be satisfied with whatever we come up with. Debate is not a showcase of the power and triumph of the human being ruminating on issues alone; it’s the place where innovation, development, and good thinking is produced. Making good reasons in the context of opposition and with an audience who is skeptical, or pushing back on what is being said, is how reasoning is designed to work. From that forum we can then branch out into discussion, reflection, and other modes of supposed good discourse (even intergroup dialogue) but it must have debate as the root.

Our politics today result from the ideology that the best and only way to discover the truth is to ponder it alone and deeply until you have an a-hah moment. We have low-quality or non-existent public discourse on important matters because we believe the truth has been discovered privately and now must be accepted by our interlocutors. We do not believe that our opponents are there for anything other than conversion to the truth.

Twitch could have cut into this by generating some official streaming channels and then letting users do their own thing on the theme, topic, or even on rebuttal to the official stream content. This might take time to catch on. It would generate interest due to the variety of interesting arguments, statements, and thoughts being shared concerning whatever is produced.

What I’m suggesting is a risky idea. It’s also not what happened. Although Twitch did tell me when I was there they were interested in moving into the “educational space,” Twitch decided to go a different way entirely by offering big contracts to big streamers, working on something that I saw more as a Hollywood star system from the early 20^th century. Retaining talent on a contract basis might have been a way to convince advertisers that there would always be eyeballs on the screen that wouldn’t click away – star power would keep them tuned in.

I’m not sure how other people used Twitch, but I enjoyed finding a game I hadn’t played in a while and seeing who was streaming it or finding a brand new game and seeing what players were doing with it. I also felt that Twitch should have left video games behind and would have naturally – people were coming up and are coming up with creative ways to stream, yes, including hot tub streamers – this sort of innovation, however distasteful, seems part of the direction of the platform if it’s to be governed by creation and actions of those using it.

Twitch might go away or might be bought, again, by another company. It seems everyone involved is realizing what every heterosexual woman already knows – you can’t pretend that it’s fun to watch someone play a video game for very long. I think that the label of Twitch as a video game streaming platform is unfortunate because it is so well adhered to the platform. What would it take to reconsider Twitch as a space for public discourse, creative discourse, and engagement with ideas in a productive way – the way debate should be considered?

Reviewing my teaching (read “teaching”) this semester is depressing. That’s the thesis of this piece.

My first-year students are not accessible via the normal commonplaces of the classroom which would include:

1. Read this text, what was interesting about it to you?

2. What do you think about this piece?

3. What stands out to you as interesting here?

4. What does this make you think about from your other courses?

This is insane that students do not come prepared for such basic tropes of classroom rhetoric. Instead, they have been taught through their experiences (perhaps even direct instruction) that college is about figuring out what the professor wants and doing it. The way you do that is look at the points, look at the rubric, and do exactly that – no questions needed.

It’s the most cynical approach to education that I think you could possibly have. Yet, there is hope.

Students seem mesmerized that I can construct arguments out of the shared reading for the class. When I noticed this lack of ability to create any sort of discourse around the reading, I asked them what they would prefer to talk about and gave them options. The response was: “We’d like to hear you talk about what you think.”

This seems like a lazy dodge at first, however I think this is more them being shocked, or impressed, that this is possible. Imagine having never been asked to construct anything other than the required meanings/responses to a text – Common Core instruction. Now you are in a situation where someone can riff off of a text using their own ideas, experiences, and other stories to craft a way of looking at the text that isn’t obvious, or on the approved list of meanings.

This would seem like magic to you, and yes, someone who is very good at rhetoric would present magical vibes – we would respond by saying “they are so right, they are so good – that was really inspirational” – all forms of a kind of language-magic that one can practice and become quite good at.

Professors should start to think about the classroom less as a holy place and more of a place of exchange and performance where they are the director and writer of what happens. Such a conception can be pulled from a powerful metaphor in the programming/computer science world: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

“The Cathedral and The Bazaar” is an essay written by Eric S. Raymond to describe philosophical approaches to writing and developing software. Raymond argues that there are two major approaches to creating software: One looks more like the historical institution of the Cathedral, where high priests control access to everything and the users must depend on them for any updates, interpretations, or solutions to novel problems. This is a classical, old-world church where even the language and access to the source – the holy text – is secured and made inaccessible to the common person.

The bazaar is the opposite. In that place the common person is in charge, moving from shop to shop to see what is available, what they need, and what they can use. Everything is open and available to them. In this model one gets access to finding what they want, if available, and if not they can figure out how to combine elements from different shops to make it in a tactical, de Certeau sort of manner. This is a distributed system – you have what you’d like to do and you spread it among different people who all have different reasons for being interested. Nobody has to wait for one shop to come up with the total package.

What would this look like in teaching? Well most teachers probably have some form of the bazaar already functioning: Parts of other people’s courses that worked for them in the past, scanned chapters from out of print books here and there, and documents or decks created years ago and tweaked by student reaction or changes in the field. I think that this is still somewhat cathedral thinking, as it relies on the teacher to make things happen. How could we have students moving through the course in a way to where they do not have to rely on the teacher as a gatekeeper of the systems or information they would like?

Online education such as LMS and programs like GoReact and Discord might open up the classroom in this way, but for me it’s still a tough question. How do I step out of the way and let the students serve as resources for one another in building our “software,” i.e. the course and the educational goals within? I’m always “pointing at the moon” as the ancient Buddhist koan identifies as the inevitable poverty of teaching. By pointing out something – even that they should be resources for one another in the study of a subject – I have inexorably linked myself to the experience, taking away some of the pedagogy of the realization of the encounter. On the other side, they wouldn’t have any of the experience at all if I had not said “look at this.”

Why don’t you talk about the book? Maybe this question is the solution to the problem it sparked in my mind. Perhaps I should just say this at the start of the class and see what happens. At first they will think it’s a trick, a way to find out who didn’t read or who just read a little to pass as “having read.” But over time maybe they will find what they say to one another as more valuable than anything I could say. Maybe some modeling is necessary to cut through all the poor teaching they’ve experienced. Not sure what I’ll try in the spring term of 2024 just yet. I have to finish constructing the Big Finger – the syllabus – an ancient artifact we might be better without, but since we are all addicts, it could be fatal to just stop using it cold. Where’s the pedagogical methadone?

This is an essay about incapacity in two variants sparked by having what I currently feel is the worst semester of teaching I’ve ever had. I believe the issues origins are interesting to discuss but are not relevant, as the quest for origins and starting points isn’t something that should interest a rhetorician. Instead the rhetorician should be interested in adaptation to conditions in order to create connections and agreement in and around ideas.

Student Incapacity

The students who failed public speaking or who came very close to public speaking share similar practices of the classroom. My assumption is that the students behave in these ways because they were successful practices for them in past schooling.

Most of them did not play on laptops or phones, but kept their desks clear.

They stared at me the whole class. They said nothing and contributed nothing. Perhaps one of them might have made a comment once or twice but most of them were silent all term.

When the term was nearing the end they announced in various ways they were “ready to do the work now” which I told them was too late.

The reactions were “mixed” in a way – but all indicated a common practice of begging to do and doing alternative assignments at the very last moment in the course. Many of them told me multiple times they “are a good student.” Some of them failed and weren’t sure why – they had only done about half of the work for the course.

I’m not discussing just a couple of people but a large amount of my students. I would say about 10 of them were like this in a class of 19.

This incapacity is troubling as it shows young people perceive schooling as an arbitrary ritual, completely divorced from their intellectual capabilities. School isn’t about improving ones abilities or questioning the way to approach the world or engage with it. School for these people is a task or a job to be performed for a boss. It’s purely customer/workplace in rhetoric and attitude.

The students have learned that school is a very simple game of making deals to complete work and receive a grade for that work, however begrudgingly it was accepted by the instructor. This focus of the class means that anything that doesn’t seem useful toward that endgame can be safely ignored. This includes any and all class discussion or engagement with ohters during the class time.

This fall was particularly bad in this regard as the students in my in-person course did not feel they needed to do anything except be present and perform non-distraction. This is why their desks were clean and they sat staring forward – they are good students after all. This performance means no phones, no laptops, and no disruption. Obedience and quiet is the subject of the course.

The challenge is how to get such students to start to engage the critical functions that university graduates should be able to exercise. This would include asking questions of what they are being told about reality, asking about supporting evidence and reasons, and pushing back with counter-claims about what they are being told. Although I primarily teach public speaking, this or any course could include such practices such as:

• Why would I need evidence for that? Everyone knows it!

• Why does a speech have to be that long?

• How do you know that this will make the audience listen?

• Why do we have to study this, isn’t it outdated?

• Why are all speeches so boring?

The list can go on, but these to me seem like the commonplaces of a public speaking class and I would expect them to come up with regularity. These of course are more specialized topoi, what are some of the common topoi for university courses?

• Why do we have to read this?

• Who cares if I cite anything?

• What’s the point of writing an essay?

And so on. Although most professors I know would find these questions annoying and roll their eyes, many more would find these questions “disrespectful” – that magic word that faculty use today as a catch-all term. I’m not sure what it exactly means, but the range of the meaning is something like: I wish I had students that didn’t require so much effort on my part.

Unfortunately, this dream or desire to have ready-made students is just encouraging producing the containers of future fascism. Being able to just exist quietly and go along with the authority without any questioning of the reason behind it is teaching that following authority has its own rewards. And if a student does speak up or push on some of these critical topoi, the fear of the class is that somehow this will come back to hurt them all.

I’m already there, but let’s look at the other side of this, the dialectical engagement of the problem of things.

Faculty Incapacity

Faculty incapacity primarily takes place in the leaning on “easy” or “more real” standards for enforcing student learning. The discourse of the teacher is a capitalist discourse, as teachers will always threaten students with “real world” analogues to their behavior or work ethic: “Your boss won’t tolerate this,” “How will you be able to hold down a job if you are late so often?”

Never do you hear a teacher say “How will you be able to determine which candidate to vote for?” “How will you be able to express your opinion on community issues if you write this way?” “How will you gain trust and get to know your neighbors if you can’t keep a schedule?” These things are vital to democracy, while the previous questions are vital to a capitalist-fascist order. Although it is important to be able to make ends meet, that is not necessarily best dealt with in a forced-labor system like American capital or time-work discipline, an artifact from industrialization.

Faculty are also incapacitated by not being informed of the needs of the students that are showing up in the classroom. I noticed many of my students are marked provisional admission or some sort of “step up” program of admission rather than having met the admission requirements of the university. This might not seem like a big deal to administrators, most of which don’t think about teaching as a demanding process, but more of a ritual of acquiring credits to graduate. For the classroom professor though this is a huge issue. Being made incapable by not being told or being offered assistance for the students who might not be what we assume they will be is setting up the system to fail, not just the students.

What is the university system? If it’s functioning well it creates confident doubt – that is, people who are university educated are confident that they can explore and inquire after doubt in things they are being told to think, feel, or do. This is a system of engagement with the world that isn’t very sexy, but is very essential to the practice of democracy. Alternatively, those who are scared of not knowing or aren’t sure what to do when faced with conflicting information or a story that sounds good go hardcore into denial or acceptance – a practice helpful for the fascist.

Faculty also need to get over themselves, plain and simple. What does this mean? It means that faculty must give up the fantasy that they are somehow holding a social status that requires deferment and an obsequious attitude from students. Many professors I know are very angry about student quality because they email them at the wrong time in the wrong grammar, they show up to the office unannounced to ask for a better grade, or they turn in an assignment that did not follow the complicated instructions in the syllabus. It is clear that one could be angry about all this, but the critical thinker might say instead: The practices of what I feel are normal student behavior have a near 100% failure rate. What can I do to adapt to the students I have? It’s kind of sad to me to see many professors of rhetoric not asking this question, one that is at the heart of the study of the art of rhetoric.

We must keep in mind that the students we get are not “university students” they are simply our students. Applying or assuming an attitude about them always is risky. My assumptions this past fall failed hard – they are incapable. But what are they incapable of? They are incapable of meeting the fantasy role for “University Student” I imagined when creating the course, readings, and syllabus. I must now try to figure out what they are capable of. Their behavior isn’t the behavior of idiots; on the contrary, these behaviors are practiced and refined precisely because they have been working for students in past school experiences they have had. There’s nothing I can do about that history except to learn from it, and try to create a narrative for my courses that draws on it but doesn’t keep it static. Things must change. This is the only way forward.

Is nothing being taught? It’s not so simple. I do wish nothing was being taught for what I see being taught and being prepared are easy receptors for fascism. A good student is attentive, still, and distraction-free. They obey and are willing to do whatever is necessary to pass. After all, they are good students through and through. And they will do whatever the authority says will get them a “good grade.”

The never-ending series

This is the discourse of contemporary policy debate. How do we take contemporary policy debate, mired in tournaments, and make it “for everyone?”

Right now policy debate is for those who are desired by it. They want to contort themselves in order to be objects desired to be a part of this headless knowledge. The result is uncertainty, or a portion of our thought is kept from us.

I believe that so-called debate coaches really do believe that policy debate is “for everyone.” I think they believe that if everyone had this education most of our political problems would dissolve. However their actions tell a different story: “public” debates (a funny name since debate implies publicity, audience, the public sphere, etc) are held at random, rarely, on campus for small audiences of students (many of them enticed by extra credit or mandated by the points regime to attend). They are thought of as a discounted, diluted debate form since the public is incapable of understanding serious debate (read: “undesirable”).

Debate meetings are held at night, in a remote room somewhere, and hardly advertised. There’s no attempt to recruit those who need education in debating most; instead, people who are thought to be “good debaters” might be recruited based on the perception of those already on the team or the coach’s interactions with a student in a class.

This isn’t universal of course, this is broad-brush. It used to be that Emory University had a campus engagement project that distinguished debate from policy debate in a way to where both were equal, but different. It seems at the time of this writing that this project has just become “policy debate by other means.” The shortest description on the website is the campus engagement program. It seems to engage in debate education one must engage with policy debate, become interpreted/interpolated by that knowledge.

It’s hard to find a debate program that doesn’t immediately fall into the university discourse creating subjects that “aren’t sure” why one argument is better than another. “It’s a good argument because it’s true,” “It won because they had nothing to say,” “There’s no answer to this implication,” – Ok, but why? – “Well, that’s how debate works.” Public debates are propaganda in this way, making the audience feel they cannot take part in something so sophisticated and intense, happy to defer to the experts who can tell them which side won and why (“they didn’t respond correctly”). Most tournament policy debate persuasion is based on a technique which dances on the edge of being fallacious. However, this makes sense: As Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca remind us, the group that believes itself to speak in universal terms is often a vanguard, effacing the connection to the universal audience by claiming universality in their discourse under a titular term such as “should.” The should/would fallacy is the operating principle of tournament policy debate.

This is a big slog, a big marsh to walk through if I want to make policy debate accessible to everyone in a way that encourages pedagogy about and around debate (rather than encouraging a specific kind of subservience to debate). But what to encourage? Lacan tells us we can rotate a discourse one-half turn from the discourse we find ourselves immersed in. The result we want might not be the result we get through our efforts to overturn the power of the current discourse. Given this, we can either flip clockwise to the master’s discourse, or counter-clockwise to the analyst’s discourse. In the traditional syllogistic arrangement, the hysteric’s discourse is a contrary to the university discourse.

The discourse of the hysteric is the “teaching discourse” as Bruce Fink has called it, since the result is the abundance of the production of knowledge. Note that this knowledge is not “the student’s” knowledge or the knowledge of the other, but the official ordering of things that comes into being when the master is invoked. The teacher knows this, but cannot upset the power balance for then the gig would be up. The teacher is there to teach not what to think, but how to think. What to think is the domain of the Discourse of the University. How to think is the domain of the Discourse of the Hysteric. The reason for this is that the students have to internalize the logic of the master/knowledge relation to participate in the discourse, to get the proper result.

The model I think of in debate pedagogy when I think about this is the debate squad room, shooting out ideas about the new resolution. The “coach” sort of knows what arguments will have weight (tabling how odd it is to know this already given the topic and audience being new/undetermined) and questions the debaters on every idea to see not if their ideas have rhetorical valence but if those ideas fit into the expectations of the master’s knowledge. Do these ideas fit into the limits of what is permissibly knowable at a tournament? For the tournament and the rules derived from having good tournaments (eg: smooth, easy to run, clear breaks) are the true master of policy debating these days, or any sort of formal, competitive debating out there. This post is about policy debate but might not be limited to it.

Particular to policy debate and the way I’m trying to see if it can be made pluralistic and democratic in my own sense of things, I’m curious how much hysteria is productive pedagogically. What I mean by that is, there’s a certain comfort in being able to discuss any issue within the bounds of the predictable and knowable confines of order that comes from “out there.” When we push students in lecture to explain why something is true, or why that theory matters, they then attempt to please the Master by showing mastery of a language that is not their own; it is a language that has as its grammar the master’s authority.

Perhaps in the incessant “Whys” of the hysteric’s discourse one hears some of the overworked machinery of the master in there – and it might inspire the students to take on the questioning role toward their own work and their own answers. Why does this argument work so well? What is truly holding it together? Although many of us claim that debate radicalized us, it seems spurious at best to look to the discourse of the hysteric as the reason why – there’s nothing here that would innately make us think radically. It’s a far cry from dialectics and farther from the politics and ethics that many who have been taught in debate cannot imagine their lives without. It has to come from somewhere other than this discourse, although as a response or a next step from the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse is obviously empowering.

After writing this (Which took some time) I have to say I’m thinking that two debates may not be enough to capture the pressure one needs from the hysteric’s questioning to break through to a truly revolutionary understanding of knowledge and rhetoric. More to come on this question in the next, and final post about policy debating in the classroom.

I have hopes that basing a debate class around the strictures of policy debate as we know it (university discourse) and pushing the students to align with the Master (hysteric’s discourse) there will be times an elements where dissatisfaction, or even the Lacanian “gap” between expected pleasure and the drive may be enough for there to be an unravelling that allows rhetoric a powerful place in policy debate to allow students to really play with a lot of the controversies in the world that have seemed a distant stage-show in an unfamiliar language and they are part of an unwilling audience with bad seats.