The New York Sophist

One of the commitments that I have that’s hard for me to shake is the idea that everyone can change their mind given the right amount of time, the right place, and the right conversation with the right person. There are so many factors involved here that it might be easier to just say, “It is rare for people to be able to change their mind,” or perhaps, “it is rare that people change.” This is the conventional wisdom, but I think it represents a very unhealthy way to think in society, a very fatalistic attitude, and it gives up the history and tradition of rhetoric and the persuasive arts to the very shallow enlightenment concept of a stable, objective reality that can be accessed and applied to all of us with the right set of refined epistemological tools. We lose people that way, and more importantly, we lose a foundational concept of democracy, that of it being about people deciding. The more people we exclude from it, the less like democracy it becomes.

What got me writing this post was the large amount of people on social media saying that the current situation in the U.S. is not the time to persuade or argue, that things are too dire, that it’s not time to change minds , that people have chosen their side and it’s time to go to battle. Although it certainly feels this way, and looks this way on the streets of America’s major cities, this isn’t right. It’s times like this that are perfect to engage others in mind-changing activities, or what we might call argumentation, persuasion, or debate. 

The best times to get engaged in persuasion or arguing with others is when people want to talk. Generally, if people are sharing their views on things – or sharing the same 20 memes or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes – this means they are motivated to speak about what is going on, they want to talk, they want to engage others. I think there are two primary situations in which people really, really want to talk:

1. They have discovered something good, true, or right. They want to tell others about it and bring others on board with the cool new thing (well they think it’s the truth) that they have found. This is why I often say “Truth is the starting point, not finishing point, for rhetoric.” It is what motivates people to talk. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovery? More likely it’s the thrill one gets from exercising power over others and showing them how wrong they are (the dark side of rhetoric to be sure). 

2. They have discovered the principles upon which they base a lot of their navigation through daily life have become unglued, unsticky, are developing cracks, or seem to be rusting. This is more of a panicked reinforcement of principle and belief and a look for reassurance. They want to engage others to say “this isn’t right!” “This should not be happening!” etc. 

Sometimes you get both happening at once, i.e. “Things are a mess but I know what we need to do!” I think that best qualifies as the description of where we are now with the protests happening across the U.S.

When things become controversial, when things go off the rails, things get cloudy and our first impulse is to fan the dust away, vacuum it up, clean it all off, and get a clear picture again. Our initial response is to cut through the dust and fog and find clarity and certainty for ourselves and our fellow citizens, friends, and people. This speaks to the power of the utterance and the rhetorical precept to provide a navigable path through the polarized and unstable world for us. Just think about how confident submarine captains and navigators are when the sonar is working properly. That’s us! Just sound, sound alone is what gives them the confidence to say “Turn here,” or “dive 100 meters” or whatever they do. But if we were there we would be a bit claustrophobic. 

When the sonar goes out, everyone is in real trouble, and we really can’t move, we can’t act, we can’t operate. We need that sounding board. We need those precepts and preconceptions about what to do; what to bounce our decisions off of. We start to ping a lot when there’s confusion, uncertainty, newness, or a crazy web of discovery. We start to talk and reassert our presence and our pathways by re-articulating the things that we stand for and believe. 

In times when there is not a lot of dust kicked up, when there’s not much cloudiness or fog at all we don’t articulate our supporting principles or positions because, well, it’s obvious where to go and obvious what to do. Things are clear, we don’t need to ping as much. We might do a bit of it if we meet up with a friend, but again, the stakes are not high if we disagree, we are just talking, and things are pretty good. 

The opportune situation for persuasion is when the rhetorical dust is everywhere, and we are very constantly and very repetitively saying the things that used to be helpful in guiding us. This repetitive nature of speech (or social media posting, as I have experienced) is a cry for a stable field, for agreement, and for consideration. It’s the cry to engage, and it’s the characteristic invitation to persuasion. “This is what I think” is the natural moment for the engagement with others, for the asking of questions and developing new ones. It’s the invitation for exchange – signal back! Help me get some footing here? Or perhaps more relevant, share my footing with me! For it’s rare that we doubt our own footing on matters of culture, society, race, policy, and governance. 

So the right time, the right situation for persuasion is when there’s smoke in the air and disruption in the streets. The person who is angry about the traffic jams that protesters have been causing is speaking exactly to my point: Why won’t this familiar pathway provide me what I want? And the response to that question is to start asking others, to start engaging and seeing how and where they go. When people are willfully expressing their underlying beliefs about how things should be, that’s a great time to move the conversation toward those things.

It’s much more difficult to get to the principles or underlying beliefs without the rhetorical dust all around, clouding things up. But with that there, we can start to look at the why question, and start to look at the supports and the foundation of things. This is a great opportunity, and one that most rhetors, when they want to persuade, have to construct very carefully. Most of us don’t want to lay bare our beliefs all the time. Often times we can’t. 

Ok so that’s probably good for one night. A lot of my beliefs here are pretty weird, I accept that. But they are motivated by improving the quality of political engagement and supporting a democracy that puts people first, above conceptions of facts, truth, right-ways-of-doing, or anything like that. Democracy requires us to be able to share our opinions in ways that make sense to as many other people as possible, then requires us to engage those shared opinions with our own thoughts and experiences. It doesn’t require the truth, or rightness, or any of that other nonsense that we think we know and put way ahead of the thoughts of other people. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this. For now, just consider the idea that times when things are unclear encourage people to say more – they say a lot more, both in words and in depth. They start to draw out their fundamental principles. And with those out and people willing to share them, there’s no better time to inquire after them in the spirit of improving thought, improving questioning, and improving the construction and co-construction of the narrative we call reality. This is one of the best times to try to persuade others. I really don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to when there’s so much discursive dust in the air.

I think that many media companies will not be able to resist the symbolic value of owning a Broadway theater. Get ready for the Netflix theater, the Amazon theater, the Epic Games theater, the Dreamworks theater, and on and on.

All will run live theater shows like Fortnite and Trolls World Tour as sort of spruced up versions of touring ice shows for children. Broadway might become midwestern-style family entertainment if a number of theaters are sold. 

But Broadway does not make a lot of money, and is more for awards and acclaim that you are a “real artist” making “art.” So of that grouping I think only Jeff Bezos would be happy to take the kind of losses that you have to take in Broadway to get Tony award recognition. I think that he is the most likely to be able to adopt the mindset of many Broadway producers. 

Broadway had already lost a lot of its experimental attitude and edge pushing over the last 20 years or so. What was closed when Broadway went dark for the quarantine? Well, musicals that were mostly combinations of hit songs with a convoluted plot written around them, most likely inspired by the success of Jersey Boys – which continues to make money in many ways. People are designing around that. 

The most innovative and interesting Broadway theater either was a hit or a miss. The Great Comet was an amazing, innovative, new musical, as was Hamilton, but the difference is so great there that one wonders what to model. Both seem to have a similar formula, but one just really hit. 

The formula of Rent, another monster success that was risky was to take an old opera and modernize it – something out of the Oscar Hammerstein school of musical-writing. This is the sort of thing he had Stephen Sondheim do when he was teaching him how to write musical theater. 

Hamilton is taking historical characters and retelling their lives through contemporary forms of music. But The Great Comet wasn’t doing that? I mean, Chernow’s book is almost as long as War and Peace. And there are a lot of historical moments in both that aren’t entirely narrative. But I guess the question is what is going to hit a nerve – something you can’t ever predict. 

In rhetoric, my field of study, we often say that the rhetor can call into being the audience that he or she wants to have before them. This is done by the rhetor addressing who they imagine will be out there, and what they want them to be receptive to. The rhetor creates an appetite among the people to be a certain kind of person, or push forward a certain attitude or set of values, and then the rhetor addresses that concoction.  I wonder how hard this would be to do in Broadway?

My feeling is that great American theater has always been pushing audiences to a better version of themselves by making them the promise that if they accept something a little bit off from what they would ask for, they will be a lot better off for it. Instead of whistling the catchy tunes as you walk to the subway, you are perhaps considering how to feel about the central characters, and how the music amplifies the ease or difficulty you have in accepting the attitude you have. 

I think this element of theater is one of the best elements of it, and the Broadway musical is a very powerful and creative form of theater for the exploration of how to make audiences better groups of people. Or maybe what I mean is that well-constructed theater has the power to force audiences to reconsider who they are while they take on the role of an observer. They are asked to take in a performance as a group, and the group is called into being as a theater audience in particular ways, then they watch actions and reactions, declarations and engagements between people who could be them or could never be them, then they are asked to leave with all of that experience. What are they meant to do? I think they are given a rare shot to reflect on themselves as not-themselves, or as an audience to a play reflect on motives that could very well be their own in similar circumstances, which a well designed play might hint to them are pretty close to their own circumstances. In short – Burkean identification/division. I know you are so surprised.

In the end I think rhetoricians are concerned with this same thing if they really investigate what they are asking audiences to do when they speak to them. After all they are speaking to the construct they have made of them in their mind, the words are always addressed to who the rhetor believes to be out there. Theater does this too with the hope that the performances will be believed. And if they are, what changes? What stays the same?

I hope that there are still Broadway theaters left to explore these questions after the pandemic comes to an end. I hope they can hold out. I know that they are supposed to begin reopening after Labor Day, which seems too late, but it might be too early. We don’t know enough about the virus to say either way yet.

Always a bit of whiplash to read the brilliant work in composition studies. I really shouldn’t do it; it depresses me when I compare it to the seething vista of nonsense that counts as pedagogy in speech communication. There’s nothing but discussions of how to grade, how annoyed they are at students, and how teaching public speaking is beneath a scholar of their importance (don’t look at the Taylor & Francis journal circulation stats if this is you, you’ll be very upset!).

Public speaking is a composition course, it’s a course that investigates the question of how to produce meaningful texts for audiences. This no doubt involves a ton of other questions, such as ethics (when, where and how should this be done, if at all?) and epistemology (how do we know we mean something; how do people constitute, reject, and receive meaning?). For some reason, we wait till some esoteric high-level rhetorical theory or criticism course to engage all this. We should be engaging it in public speaking. 

The problem is two-fold as I see it. First, we (communication professors) have discounted public speaking as unimportant (or “punishment” as one scholar I heard call it). So we don’t consider it worthy of our theory, criticism, or other “high level” rhetorical practices. 

Also our field has found it appropriate for some bizarre reason to excommunicate debate and forensic activity to the basement, or some remote place away from the department, placed it in the hands of sports enthusiasts rather than educators, and has built as many barriers as they can between the department and the forensics program. The attitude in most departments is: “We really are proud of what you are doing, but please stay out of the conference room during the day.”

This has the effect of eliminating any valuable pedagogical crossover between those who directly practice performances, under various conditions, for audiences who are there to evaluate and improve those performances. Although saddled down a bit too much by competitive norms (a problem with any vanguard audience) this kind of reiterative, practice-oriented pedagogy is invaluable in a course that is presumably about the question of how to create meaningful texts for audiences with your body and voice. 

With both of our most powerful resources as a field held at bay from the course that sustains us, funds our graduate programs, funds our departments, etc, what are we left with as the content of public speaking? Outlines, works cited pages, attendance, and mobile phone use seem to be the most frequently graded things in public speaking. 

A very bad narrative of persuasion is in there too: Facts are all you need. Ethos is our cool word for “expert.” If an expert says it, you’re an idiot if you don’t listen to them (history shows this to be a very bad idea). Pathos is our cool word for feelings; make sure you get angry at racism and essentialism when you see it (don’t worry, it’s obvious what it looks like). Logos is logic, which pretty much means use facts and believe facts. Occasionally there’s a fallacy quiz (maybe just one; this isn’t argumentation after all!). And that’s about it.

What the course should be is an infusion of our best theories and our best pedagogies. This means that we should be teaching crucial concepts to students in public speaking such as the pentad, second/third/fourth persona, identification/division, quasi-logical argumentation, universal audience, constitutive audience theory, topoi, the commonplaces (the work of Michael Leff is valuable here for selecting readings for class), and so on – the works. And we should be engaging them in the dynamic, reiterative, interactive energy of our forensics and debate instructors. Amazing transformative education comes out of moments of peer engagement – writing center pedagogy relies on this axiom as an article of faith – and we have a very unique resource for this through forensics and debate. This is of course if we really want to make better speakers and give up our perverse pleasure of telling stories about how bad the reasoning is among our public speaking students (I hear these stories all the time; I think they are meant to be humorous).  It’s telling that public speaking instructors never share stories of excellent, mind-blowing speeches. Compositionists often share parts of essays in their research from students that are pretty engaging. We don’t do any public speaking scholarship like that. 

I did write here a few weeks ago that I was going to be proposing some public speaking ideas, so this one might be the first: 

The aim of the course is to practice the creation of texts meant to mean something for audiences.

That’s the best way I can summarize this starting point. I think there are a lot of petitios here, which makes it not a fallacy, but a rich site of inquiry. What is a text? What does it mean to create a text? What does it mean to mean something? And what is an audience?

From those simple begged question alone, an entire public speaking course can be created. Make those the headings. Select 2 or 3 readings for each. Have the students speak about the readings. And at the end of each unit, time to reiterate a speech they have been working on all term. 

Sometimes I’ve had a class all speak about the same topic, sometimes I have them change. I like this model, as we are working on a piece (eg. forensic competition) and making it better. I think that’s a great invitation to bring in those practices and make public speaking valuable. We need to do something. Most of you out there reading this think public speaking is a waste of your pedagogical and scholarly talents.

I can only agree with you. Let’s make it a course worthy of our field, not some right of passage we put graduate students through.

Feeling kinda useless right now. Wish I was a bit more helpful or had some means to be helpful. I am still a firm believer that formal education is one of our finest ways to avoid the state of affairs we find ourselves in. This education is unfairly constructed, serves the interests of established power, and is unfairly distributed. So even my best hope is hopelessly corrupted by the very thing that it purports to address.

I see around me the results of a world that has taught us to value facts above people. If you are a criminal, you cannot change. If you are a cop, you cannot change, situations are as they are. People are types. They are not going to change. People are bad or good. States are bad or good. All of this means persuasion is impossible. Time to replicate the truth until others get it.

Everyone gleefully shares the same posts on social media to accomplish this and it’s just sad, but I can understand that, because I too am feeling very useless at the moment, and it would be great to pretend that something like that – or something like this post – had any bearing or use on the situation. I love to think that by writing this I am being helpful when helpfulness – the very concept of helping out – seems so distant that it feels exhausting to conceptualize it.

Writing is often thought of as an alternative to violence, as a way to solve problems without resorting to violence. But rhetoric (writing is that of course) more often is complicit in violence as a masked form of violence, as coercion, as a way to hide power behind reason and force others into the position of rejecting reasonable objectivity when they want to make their position known. Rhetoric also requires practice, and time for such practice is predicated on wealth, status, and resources. Space. And time. All things that are deprived to those because of how we have chosen to organize things. 

It feels good and is pleasurable to speak to a vanguard. It’s frightening and difficult to speak to a public. I wish this was the first line in every public speaking textbook out there, but it’s not. It immediately begins speaking to the vanguard, as a vanguard, preparing the vanguard for more conversation. I guess I would like a Public Cringing course, or another good title for a public speaking class, “Nervously Loquacious,” apologies to Kenneth Burke.

Uncertainty should be taught more than it is. Respect for it and life with it. Professors spend a hell of a lot of time degrading and discounting student work over citation form, but don’t comment on how few non-whites appear in the references. They don’t comment on how the use of Google reinforces the perspective of consumer, while searching in a library reinforces . . . what? Is it possible to think outside of consumer? Apparently not. The Minnesota situation is troubling because the only political grammar is consumer objects. Move over internet of things. Welcome, politics of things. 

The only thing I can think of that might be helpful is to sit with the question, “why?” Sitting with one question, letting it think you as much as you think it, letting it explore itself and you observe that exploration, is, I’ve found, a good way to not get caught up in the machinery of power, to accept that feeling when it shows up and let it speak, but let other interpretations speak as well. We need more than a light switch for political conversation, but most things fall into the light switch model. 

Sitting with “Why?” and letting it ask itself and preserving the space and time is an alternative political position. Why? Because stillness, quiet, and thought are not valued in consumer society. Speed, branding, PR, announcements, and ROI are valued. This is maybe not a good way to arrange things. But it’s all we have left as a political rhetoric. 

Why? – the pentadic equivalent is “purpose.” So I guess I’m suggesting creating a pentadic ratio purpose-purpose here (if you are a Burkean). “Why ask why?” – perfectly fine. Letting the question lead is what is needed now so we can fully explore the roots, the situation, the scope, the entirety of why, the whole atlas of why, to begin to address the next question, should it ever appear.

Tried to sing this title to the tune of “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” but no luck. It appears now that I won’t have access to play the game until 4AM tomorrow, so no dice tonight. 

Been writing a lot, but not here, so here’s a post that contains several threads, kind of like an appetizer sampler plate like we used to get at restaurants back in the day.

Terminal Illin’

The Term is over, and now I’m chillin. Thinking about the term a lot, and I have been writing out an extension of some of my public speaking ideas I hinted at in the last post, but the overall feeling of the term is that it is good that it is over, and not all illnesses are virus-bourne. My self-diagnosis is:

• I assign too much work for students to do

• That work is  primarily writing-heavy. If it’s not, it’s not “serious”

• This means the courses have a negative expectation, i.e. “What will this class take” is the first question rather than “What will I get?” as the first response to the class session. 

• Video chat is not the model for course delivery online (webex, zoom, etc). This is not a classroom and a classroom is not needed, it is accidental to teaching.

The prescription is:

• Assign less, or if you do the same amount lower the stakes. Like a lot.

• Become fluid and comfortable in oral assessment. Helps with the stakes to make an assignment to record some oral responses to questions on your phone and post them.

• Writing-intensive does not mean writing-heavy. When assigning writing, make sure that it is attended to, not a background mode of transmission of the evidence of learning.

• Treat class as episodic, and resolution driven – with arcs – so the expectation becomes “What will I get today” when engaging with the class. Explore playwriting/scriptwriting for ideas.

• Streaming is the way a class should go. See Twitch. Streaming with a chat room. That will increase engagement joy and positive expectation. 

So now time to get the technical parts of all this arranged at some point in the summer. Lower the stakes, increase the frequency, don’t fall prey to the idea that writing is somehow more real or superior to the oral (Derrida), and increase frequency of student/professor verbal interaction plus decrease time of assessment of exercises. 

Learning to transition totally to Discord as well, which is a steeper learning curve than I thought looking at everything from Blackboard that it is going to need to replicate. We’ll only have to visit Blackboard for formal grading I think. I can deliver all feedback and commentary on assignments via Blackboard, and students can easily post work for peer review and commentary. 

Podcasting

I think podcasting is the future of higher ed more or less, and what got me thinking about it is how easy it is to produce for those of us on the teaching side of things, how easy it is to share it, and how nice of an advertisement it becomes for our university when we make them somewhat public. 

The value of digital audio is underrated. It’s low bandwidth (can be downloaded quickly onto any device with any sort of bad internet). Takes up little space (MP3 and Org Vorbis are very small files). You are immersed in it if it’s prepared well (all teachers should have a decent, stereo microphone, at least a condenser USB for this, but still cheaper than cameras/video production for YouTube) and the student can listen while doing other things (elder/childcare, housework, family business work, food prep, etc.) All this and a phone is a natural place to consume it makes it ideal in my mind for course delivery. 

Studying how to present on radio, how to voiceover, and how to speak dynamically and interestingly for the ear is on the list. I model someone I think is quite good at speaking for radio, Dan Patrick, a sports journalist who has a morning sports talk show on AM radio nationally in the U.S. There are other models as well. 

Delivering a whole course through high-quality, episodic audio, with conversations and with a bend toward it being desirable to listen to would be the model. Practicing that with the re-launch of In the Bin, which seems to be taking off pretty well. 

The Library

I’m always grateful to have a research library, but today after looking for a book and realizing that it is locked away in my university library with no way to get to it for the foreseeable future, I am even more grateful for the amount of digital resources out there. 

Feeling very lucky to have great internet, and after tweaking this terrible Verizon FIOS router today a few times, I think I finally have apartment-wide coverage that won’t stutter or hesitate, or go dark for a few minutes at least a couple of times a day.

Internet access is so important that I wonder if the university is doing it wrong. Why not give the students a subsidy of some kind for home internet, or wireless internet from their phone provider (hotspot, etc) and pay for that by reducing the quality of the internet provided on campus? I know private carriers in New York City, even the public WiFi offered through the kiosks sometimes feels faster than our campus WiFi, so why invest so heavily in it?

I’m also way behind where I wanted to be on my book that I’m writing, and I have a couple of other ideas for drafts of things to get out before September. Already finished one book chapter, and waiting on a round of edits for a second to come back to me. Working on a couple of essays too. But honestly, when I really look at my workflow, the things that are most engaging and most exciting to work on are the prepared orations for podcasting. There’s something really incredible about preparing to speak. This is why I can’t be a composition teacher even though I know I would love to be one. Composition is so important, but it’s also so narrow. Oratory is my thing, pretty certain of it now, and although I might not be great at it, I really do enjoy working on it, preparing it, and thinking about how it’s going to be heard. I like thinking about the audience out there, hearing it, and wondering what they must be thinking; what they weren’t thinking before they heard what I said, how I said it.